A Cognitively Grounded Measure of Pronunciation Distance

Title
A Cognitively Grounded Measure of Pronunciation Distance
Publication Date
2014
Author(s)
Wieling, Martijn
Nerbonne, John
Bloem, Jelke
Gooskens, Charlotte
Heeringa, Wilbert
Baayen, R Harald
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Place of publication
United States of America
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0075734
UNE publication id
une:17314
Abstract
In this study we develop pronunciation distances based on naive discriminative learning (NDL). Measures of pronunciation distance are used in several subfields of linguistics, including psycholinguistics, dialectology and typology. In contrast to the commonly used Levenshtein algorithm, NDL is grounded in cognitive theory of competitive reinforcement learning and is able to generate asymmetrical pronunciation distances. In a first study, we validated the NDL based pronunciation distances by comparing them to a large set of native-likeness ratings given by native American English speakers when presented with accented English speech. In a second study, the NDL-based pronunciation distances were validated on the basis of perceptual dialect distances of Norwegian speakers. Results indicated that the NDL-based pronunciation distances matched perceptual distances reasonably well with correlations ranging between 0.7 and 0.8. While the correlations were comparable to those obtained using the Levenshtein distance, the NDL based approach is more flexible as it is also able to incorporate acoustic information other than sound segments.
Link
Citation
PLoS One, 9(1), p. 1-7
ISSN
1932-6203
Start page
1
End page
7

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