Applied English Phonology

Yavaş, Mehmet

doi:10.1002/9781444392623

Cited by 60 publications

(84 citation statements)

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“…Bear et al (2003), Yavas (2006) and Raynolds and Uhry (2009) (Ladefoged, 2003), although this particular difference was not considered in the present work. English has two different phonemes to represent the letters b and v, » » and »Ú», respectively.…”

Section: Spanish Phonetics Vs English Phoneticsmentioning

confidence: 77%

Introducing nativization to Spanish TTS systems

Polyakova

Bonafonte

2011

Speech Communication

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In the modern world, speech technologies must be flexible and adaptable to any framework. Mass media globalization introduces multilingualism as a challenge for the most popular speech applications such as text-to-speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition. Mixed-language texts vary in their nature and when processed, some essential characteristics must be considered. In Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries, the use of Anglicisms and other words of foreign origin is constantly growing. A particularity of peninsular Spanish is that there is a tendency to nativize the pronunciation of non-Spanish words so that they fit properly into Spanish phonetic patterns. In our previous work, we proposed to use hand-crafted nativization tables that were capable of nativizing correctly 24% of words from the test data. In this work, our goal was to approach the nativization challenge by data-driven methods, because they are transferable to other languages and do not drop in performance in comparison with explicit rules manually written by experts. Training and test corpora for nativization consisted of 1000 and 100 words respectively and were crafted manually. Different specifications of nativization by analogy and learning from errors focused on finding the best nativized pronunciation of foreign words. The best obtained objective nativization results showed an improvement from 24% to 64% in word accuracy in comparison to our previous work. Furthermore, a subjective evaluation of the synthesized speech allowed for the conclusion that nativization by analogy is clearly the preferred method among listeners of different backgrounds when comparing to previously proposed methods. These results were quite encouraging and proved that even a small training corpus is sufficient for achieving significant improvements in naturalness for English inclusions of variable length in Spanish utterances.

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Section: Spanish Phonetics Vs English Phoneticsmentioning

confidence: 77%

Introducing nativization to Spanish TTS systems

Polyakova

Bonafonte

2011

Speech Communication

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“…As with the differences in the vowel systems, there are also noticeable differences in consonantal distributions between Persian and English (Yavas, 2006). The tables, which show the consonant systems of English and Persian languages, clearly illustrate the fact that there are more consonants in English.…”

Section: Consonantsmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…They are all voiced may be a single like /e/, as in let, or a combination, involving movement from one vowel sound to another like /eI/, as in late; such combination are know as diphthongs, and the combination of three vowel sounds are know as triphtonges like /auә/ in "our". As Yavas (2006) stated there are noticeable expected differences in vowel systems between Persian and English. Comparing the Persian vowel system with that of English reveals some significant differences in the following three areas: 1) the number of vowels, 2) tense/lax distinctions, and 3) the pure/glide (by glide I mean the movement of articulator).…”

Section: Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 96%

A Survey on Several Potentially Problematic Areas of Pronunciation for Iranian Efl Learners

Khorasgani

Aray

2017

IEFLJ

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Almost all English language teachers get students to study grammar, vocabulary, etc., but some of these same teachers make little attempt to teach pronunciation in any overt way and only give attention to it in passing. Pronunciation teaching not only makes students aware of different sounds and sound features, but can also improve their speaking. Concentrating on sounds, making aware of where words should be stressed, where words made in mouth, give students information about spoken English and help them achieve the goal of improved comprehension and intelligibility. Pronunciation forms a natural link to other aspects of language use, such as listening, vocabulary, and grammar; ways of highlighting this interdependence in teaching need to be explored. The present paper looks at the problems which Iranian learners are deal with through learning English according to the differences between their segmental and suprasegmental patterns in phonology. Comparing the Persian vowel system with that of English reveals some significant differences in the following three areas: 1) the number of vowels, 2) tense/lax distinctions, and 3) the pure/glide. There are also noticeable differences in consonantal distributions between Persian and English such as their numbers, clusters, manner and place of articulation. The syllabus types of English and Persian are also cause a lot of problem in spoken language. The differences between word stress patterns in Persian and English also make problematic areas for Iranian students. In this paper, through detailed examination of Persian and English sound systems, some of the specific problems areas have been identified, especially in reference to some of the characteristic phonological differences between the two languages.

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“…However, most English speakers do not voice initial /b/ to the full extent, and it gets devoiced when it occurs finally as in "sip" and "sib". Native speakers have a clue by which they distinguish the /b/ and /p/ in such a case (Giegerich, 1992;Jensen, 1993;McMahon, 2002;Yavas, 2011). It is the preceding vowel that gets lengthened before the originally voiced one.…”

Section: English Plosivesmentioning

confidence: 99%