The paper introduces a native-reference phone‑class geometry that measures second‑language pronunciation deviation without needing pronunciation labels, read‑aloud prompts, or matched native recordings. By averaging self‑supervised representations for each phone‑class in a native speech corpus and applying singular value decomposition, the authors create a compact coordinate system. Projecting L2 utterances into this space, they find that distances to native coordinates correlate negatively with holistic speaking proficiency and pronunciation quality, indicating the geometry captures relevant acoustic‑phonetic information for spontaneous L2 speech.
arXiv:2609.28060v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-supervised speech models encode rich phonetic information, but it remains unclear how to transform this information into interpretable metrics for...
Self-supervised speech models encode rich phonetic information, but it remains unclear how to transform this information into interpretable metrics for second-language (L2) pronunciation assessment in...
arXiv:2606. 20137v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models typically predict utterance-level naturalness MOS and can be insensitive to localized pitch-accent errors.
The paper presents a method for creating a compact fixed‑voice Thai text‑to‑speech system by training a student model on synthetic speech generated from a large voice‑cloning teacher. By using only a short 15‑second voice reference and carefully filtering synthetic data, the authors build an 82‑million‑parameter model, Wayu‑Paxa‑TTS‑Edge, that runs on device without reference audio. The system achieves strong performance—68.2 % challenge‑set keyword accuracy, 91.4 % pause precision, and low character error rates—while outperforming its teacher and approaching the quality of a larger Gemini 3.1 model.
The paper introduces a method for measuring accent differences that balances interpretability and practicality. It proposes using articulatory representations obtained via articulatory inversion as an interpretable basis for accent comparison, while employing optimal transport to compare accents across any type of recording. This approach aims to overcome the limitations of traditional phonetic analyses and embedding‑based methods, which are either time‑consuming or non‑interpretable.
arXiv:2606. 06740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete speech units obtained via k-means clustering of self supervised embeddings entangle phonetic, speaker, and language information, causing speaker mixing and cross-lingual interference in multilingual multi-speaker speech generation.
arXiv:2603. 29042v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Phone recognition (PR) is a key enabler of multilingual and low-resource speech processing tasks, yet robust performance remains elusive.
arXiv:2609.14542v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neyshekar is presented as an open Persian read-speech corpus designed for coverage of both formal and informal language, named entities, and longer utt...
arXiv:2509. 15001v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Child-centered daylong recordings are essential for studying early language development, but existing speech models trained on clean adult data perform poorly due to acoustic and linguistic differences.
arXiv:2608. 09930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation methods (Mean Opinion Score (MOS) predictors and Audio Large Language Models (Audio-LLM) judges) are expected to reflect human perception, yet it is unclear how well they capture the distinct aspects of speech that listeners actually perceive.
arXiv:2606. 10213v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech sound disorders affect approximately 44% of Korean pediatric communication disorder cases, yet automated assessment tools for Korean toddler speech remain underdeveloped.
arXiv:2609.18533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems exhibit unequal error rates across speaker groups, motivating interventions on their internal representation...