Golden speaker builder – An interactive tool for pronunciation training

Ding, Shaojin; Liberatore, Christopher; Sonsaat, Sinem; Lučić, Ivana; Silpachai, Alif; Zhao, Guanlong; Chukharev‐Hudilainen, Evgeny; Levis, John M.; Gutierrez‐Osuna, Ricardo

doi:10.1016/j.specom.2019.10.005

Cited by 37 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Feedback may be provided by teachers or, less costly but not yet fully accurate, computer-assisted learning programs [43]. Interestingly, research on computer-assisted training suggested that learners benefit more from listening to their own, through speech synthesis corrected, productions than from a native model (e.g., [44,45]). A potential reason for this may be that the mental target model they have developed is also shaped by their own accent, so that a comparison with another speaker does not help detecting errors and accented pronunciation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

My English sounds better than yours: Second-language learners perceive their own accent as better than that of their peers

2020

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Second language (L2) learners are often aware of the typical pronunciation errors that speakers of their native language make, yet often persist in making these errors themselves. We hypothesised that L2 learners may perceive their own accent as closer to the target language than the accent of other learners, due to frequent exposure to their own productions. This was tested by recording 24 female native speakers of German producing 60 sentences. The same participants later rated these recordings for accentedness. Importantly, the recordings had been altered to sound male so that participants were unaware of their own productions in the to-be-rated samples. We found evidence supporting our hypothesis: participants rated their own altered voice, which they did not recognize as their own, as being closer to a native speaker than that of other learners. This finding suggests that objective feedback may be crucial in fostering L2 acquisition and reduce fossilization of erroneous patterns.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

My English sounds better than yours: Second-language learners perceive their own accent as better than that of their peers

2020

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“…The concept of "foreign pronunciation culture" was firstly introduced into methodology terminological apparatus by V. V. Buzhinskij in relation to teaching students at primary level of education and later to training linguists-teachers. The problem of teaching pronunciation has received a wide coverage in a number of foreign studies (Cimenli, 2015;Ding et al, 2019;Liakin et al, 2017;Martinsen & Alvord, 2012;Mroz, 2018;Munro, 2008;Pawlak & Szyszka, 2018;Shamat, 2019).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech Without A Hitch: On Teaching Pronunciation Culture

Корзун¹,

Lukoshus²,

Kazantseva³

et al. 2020

European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences

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“…The past 30 years have witnessed evolutionary and farreaching advances in the field of L2 pronunciation, including establishment of the intelligibility principle (Munro and Derwing, 1995;Murphy, 2014), development of a holistic approach acknowledging the importance of both segmental and suprasegmental features (Anderson-Hsieh et al, 1992;Derwing et al, 1998;Levis and Levis, 2018), and development of technologies such as speech visualization (Levis and Pickering, 2004), automated speech recognition (ASR) (Cucchiarini and Strik, 2018) and speech synthesis (Ding et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Complexity of the L2 Intonation System: An Acoustic and Eye-Tracking Study

Liu

Reed

2021

Front. Commun.

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Phonological research has demonstrated that English intonation, variably referred to as prosody, is a multidimensional and multilayered system situated at the interface of information structure, morphosyntactic structure, phonological phenomena, and pragmatic functions. The structural and functional complexity of the intonational system, however, is largely under-addressed in L2 pronunciation teaching, leading to a lack of spontaneous use of intonation despite successful imitation in classrooms. Focusing on contrastive and implicational sentence stress, this study explored the complexity of the English intonation system by investigating how L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers use multiple acoustic features (i.e., pitch range, pitch level, duration, and intensity) in signaling contrastive and implicational information and how one acoustic feature (maximum pitch level) is affected by information structure (contrast), morphosyntactic structure (phrasal boundary), and a phonological phenomenon (declination) in L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' speech. Using eye-tracking technology, we also investigated (1) L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' real-time processing of lexical items that carry information structure (i.e., contrast) and typically receive stress in L1 speakers' speech; (2) the influence of visual enhancement (italics and bold) on L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of contrastive information; and (3) L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of pictures with contrastive information. Statistical analysis using linear mixed-effects models showed that L1 English speakers and Mandarin-English L2 speakers differed in their use of acoustic cues in signaling contrastive and implicational information. They also differed in the use of maximum pitch level in signaling sentence stress influenced by contrast, phrasal boundary, and declination. We did not find differences in L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of contrastive and implicational information at the sentence level, but the two groups of participants differ in their processing of contrastive information in passages and pictures. These results suggest that processing limitations may be the reason why L2 speakers did not use English intonation spontaneously. The findings of this study also suggest that Complexity Theory (CT), which emphasizes the complex and dynamic nature of intonation, is a theoretical framework that has the potential of bridging the gap between L2 phonology and L2 pronunciation teaching.

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Golden speaker builder – An interactive tool for pronunciation training

Cited by 37 publications

References 48 publications

My English sounds better than yours: Second-language learners perceive their own accent as better than that of their peers

My English sounds better than yours: Second-language learners perceive their own accent as better than that of their peers

Speech Without A Hitch: On Teaching Pronunciation Culture

Exploring the Complexity of the L2 Intonation System: An Acoustic and Eye-Tracking Study

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