In this work, the authors present a fully statistical approach to model
non--native speakers' pronunciation. Second-language speakers pronounce
words in multiple different ways compared to the native speakers. Those
deviations, may it be phoneme substitutions, deletions or insertions,
can be modelled automatically with the new method presented here.
The methods is based on a discrete hidden Markov model as a word
pronunciation model, initialized on a standard pronunciation dictionary.
The implementation and functionality of the methodology has been proven
and verified with a test set of non-native English in the regarding
accent.
The book is written for researchers with a professional interest in
phonetics and automatic speech and speaker recognition.