Maxine Eskenazi                                                          www.cs.cmu.edu/~max        

Principal Systems Scientist                              Tel. 412 268-3858                           

Language Technologies Institute                   Fax 412 268-6298

  Carnegie Mellon University                            first three letters of my first name at three initials of the University

  6413 Gates Hillman Complex                         dot edu      

5000 Forbes Ave

Pittsburgh, PA 15213   USA                                   

 

!!! Now available!!! Eskenazi, M., Levow, G., Meng, H., Parent, G., Suendermann, D., 2013, Crowdsourcing for Speech Processing, Wiley.

http://www.amazon.com/Crowdsourcing-Speech-Processing-Transcription-ebook/dp/B00BHH0OJW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363035313&sr=8-1&keywords=speech+crowdsourcing

           

A short bio

 

I am past chair of the SLaTE special interest group (Speech and Language Technology for Education) of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) from 2006 to 2011. I am Director of the Dialog Research Center. And this year, 2013, I am co-chair of SIGDIAL’13.

 

 

GOALS     INTERESTS     PROJECTS  STUDENTS   PUBLICATIONS     TEACHING     RESOURCES

 

- Research Goals

             Understanding the variability of the speech signal. Creating automatic systems (using spoken dialogue architectures, automatic speech recognition and synthesis) that benefit from this knowledge and that in turn provide a real benefit to end users. This endeavor implies studying groups of speakers, input conditions, styles of speech and detecting the acoustic and upper-level indices that are indicative of these variants. End benefits may include language learning and information giving and gathering.

 

- Research Interests

I am interested in the variability of the speech signal – relating its sources to its manifestations, characterizing groups of speakers, grouping observable phenomena. Non-native speech is a specific interest within this area, as is speaking style.

 

            Spoken dialogue systems are one of my areas of interest. I am less interested in play systems than systems that have real users and serve a real purpose, such as Let’s Go. The Let’s Go system has been answering the phone for the Port Authority of Allegheny County every evening since the beginning of March 2005. A system with real users provides the ideal platform to run experiments on spoken dialogue such as timing and lexical entrainment. When one is lucky enough to be endowed with a system that has a constant pipeline of real users, one feels compelled to share this treasure with the research community, freely distributing the data we collect and giving them access to the system to conduct experiments of their own.

 

I am also interested in how to teach foreign languages effectively, both by a human and by a computer. This includes curriculum creation and navigation, interface issues and issues leading to robust learning. Culture underlies all language and so is also an interest of mine. And of course I am interested in pinpointing errors in non-native speech (patented!) and then providing appropriate corrective feedback.

 

The system I created to detect and correct foreign speakers’ pronunciation errors in English was called Fluency and the basic algorithms developed in that project were spun off into the NativeAccentTM product sold by the company I started, Carnegie SpeechTM. Another use of research results in use in real life! And the REAP system is also getting into the hands of many students and teachers.

 

I am the past chair of the ISCA special interest group on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE). Please visit our website for more information (www.sigslate.org).

 

- Projects

 

    Fluency – a project to use automatic speech recognition to detect pronunciation errors and to provide appropriate correction information – contact me directly for more information.

 

    Let’s Go – a project using a spoken dialogue system to expand access to such systems to the elderly and to non-native speakers.  http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/letsgo/

 

    DialRC – a Center that is at the service of the Spoken Dialog community, providing data, running studies, educating and running a Spoken Dialog Challenge  http://dialrc.org/

 

    LexE – a project on lexical entrainment on both sides of the dialog with spoken dialog systems, sometimes with non-native speakers

 

    REAP – a project to retrieve appropriate, individuated texts for students learning to read http://reap.cs.cmu.edu/ which exists in French and Portuguese as well as in English.

 

- Students

 

Present: Jose David Aguas Lopes,  Rui Correira, Andrew Fandrianto,

 

Postdocs: Oscar Saz, Sungjin Lee

 

Past: Adam Skory, Kevin Dela Rosa, Gabriel Parent, Antoine Raux, Jonathan Brown, Jie Hu, Juan Pino, Michael Heilman, Aleata Hubbard, Elizabeth Harris, Kathrin Probst, Yan Ke, Helene Maynard-Bonneau, Paul-Eric Stern, Anne Lacheret-Dujour, Yibin Lin

 

- Selected Publications

 

Spoken Dialogue Systems and Automatic Speech Recognition

 

      Sungjin Lee, Maxine Eskenazi, 2012, Incremental Sparse Bayesian Method for Online Dialog Strategy Learning. J. Sel. Topics Signal Processing 6(8): 903-916.

 

      Sungjin Lee, Maxine Eskenazi: An Unsupervised Approach to User Simulation: Toward Self-Improving Dialog Systems. SIGDIAL Conference 2012: 50-59.

 

      Sungjin Lee, Maxine Eskenazi: Exploiting Machine-Transcribed Dialog Corpus to Improve Multiple Dialog States Tracking Methods. SIGDIAL Conference 2012: 189-196.

 

      Sungjin Lee, Maxine Eskenazi: POMDP-based Let's Go system for spoken dialog challenge. SLT 2012: 61-66.

 

      Andrew Fandrianto, Maxine Eskenazi, 2012, Prosodic Entrainment in an Information-Driven Dialog System, Proceedings of Interspeech2012, Portland, OR, USA.

 

      José Lopes, Andrew Fandrianto, Maxine Eskenazi, Isabel Trancoso, 2012, Can a spoken dialog system be used as a tool for convergence?, International Symposium on Imitation and Convergence in Speech, Aix-en-Provence, France.

 

      Parent, G., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Speaking to the Crowd: looking at past achievements in using crowdsourcing for speech and predicting future challenges, Proceedings Interspeech 2011, special session on crowdsourcing, Florence Italy. pdf file

 

Parent, G., Eskenazi, M. 2010. Toward better crowdsourced transcription: Transcription of a year of the let’s go bus information system data. In Proc SLT, Berkeley, CA. pdf file

 

Parent, G., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Sources of variability and adaptive tasks, Proceedings CHI2011. pdf file

 

Alan W Black, Susanne Burger, Alistair Conkie, Helen Hastie, Simon Keizer, Oliver Lemon, Nicolas Merigaud, Gabriel Parent, Gabriel Schubiner, Blaise Thomson, Jason D. Williams, Kai Yu, Steve Young and Maxine Eskenazi, Spoken Dialog Challenge 2010: Comparison of Live and Control Test Results, Proc. SIGDIAL2011, Portland, OR. .pdf file

 

Eskenazi, M., Black, A., 2010, SDC: The Spoken Dialog Challenge, invited short presentation at SIGDIAL 2010. Slides

 

Parent, G. and Eskenazi, M. 2010. Lexical Entrainment of Real Users in the Let's Go Spoken Dialog System. In Proceedings of ISCA Interspeech 2010, Tokyo, Japan

 

Black, A., and Eskenazi, M., "The Spoken Dialogue Challenge" SIGDIAL 2009, Queen Mary University, London. 2009. pdf file

 

Gonzalez-Brenes, J., Black, A., and Eskenazi, M. "Describing Spoken Dialogue Systems Differences" IWSDS 2009, Irsee, Germany. pdf file

 

Raux, A., Langner, B., Black, A. and Eskenazi, M. Building Practical Spoken Dialog Systems ACL/HLT 2008 Tutorial, Columbus, Ohio.

 

Eskenazi, M., Black, A., Raux, A. and Langner, B., 2008, Let's Go Lab: a platform for evaluation of spoken dialog systems with real world users, Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, Australia. pdf file

 

A. Raux and M. Eskenazi, 2008, Optimizing Endpointing Thresholds using Dialogue Features in a Spoken Dialogue System, SIGdial 2008, Columbus, OH, USA. pdf file

 

A. Raux and M. Eskenazi, A Multi-Layer Architecture for Semi-Synchronous Event-Driven Dialogue Management, ASRU 2007, Kyoto, Japan. pdf file

 

Ai, H., Raux, A., Bohus, D., Exkenazi, M., and Litman, D., 2007,  Comparing Spoken Dialog Corpora Collected with Recruited Subjects versus Real Users, 8th SIGDial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Antwerp, Belgium. pdf file

 

D. Bohus, A. Raux, T. Harris, M. Eskenazi, and A. Rudnicky, 2007, Olympus: an open-source framework for conversational spoken language interface research, HLT-NAACL 2007 workshop on Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technology, Rochester, NY, USA. pdf file

 

Raux, A., Bohus, D., Langner, B., Black, A., Eskenazi, M., 2006, Doing Research on a Deployed Spoken Dialogue System: One Year of Let’s Go! Experience, Proc. Interspeech 2006, Pittsburgh, September 2006. .pdf file

 

A. Raux, B. Langner, D. Bohus, A. W Black and M. Eskenazi, Let's Go Public! Taking a Spoken Dialog System to the Real World, Interspeech 2005 Lisbon, Portugal.  .pdf file

 

Eskenazi, M., 1998, User Come Back, DARPA Communicator Compare and Contrast Meeting, June 16-17, 1998. .pdf file

 

      Ravishankar, M. and Eskenazi, M., 1997, Automatic Generation of Context-dependent Pronunciations, Proc. Eurospeech ’97, Rhodes, Greece, p. 2467 - 2470. .ps file

 

       Placeway, P., Chen, S., Eskenazi, M., Jain, U., Parikh, V., Raj, B., Ravishankar, M., Rosenfeld, R., Seymore, K., Siegler, M., Stern, R., Thayer, E., 1997, The 1996 HUB-4 Sphinx-3 System, Proc, DARPA Speech Recognition Workshop, Chantilly, Virginia, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

 

       Seymore, K., Chen, S., Eskenazi, M., Rosenfeld, R., (1997), Language and Pronunciation Modelling in the CMU 1996 HUB-4 Evaluation, Proc, DARPA Speech Recognition Workshop, Chantilly, Virginia, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

 

Computer-Assisted Language Learning

 

Eskenazi, M., 2009, An overview of spoken language technology for education, Speech Communication, Elsevier, vol 51 issue 10 p. 832-844.

 

      Vocabulary Learning

 

            Rui Correia, Jorge Baptista, Maxine Eskenazi, Nuno J. Mamede, Maxine Eskenazi, Automatic Generation of Cloze Question Stems, In International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (Propor 2012), Springer-Verlag, vol. 7243, series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 168–178, Coimbra, Portugal, April 2012.

 

            José Lopes, Isabel Trancoso, Rui Correia, Thomas Pellegrini, Hugo Meinedo, Nuno J. Mamede, Maxine Eskenazi, Multimedia Learning Materials, In IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop, IEEE, Berkeley, USA, December 2010.

 

            Rui Correia, Jorge Baptista, Nuno J. Mamede, Isabel Trancoso, Maxine Eskenazi, Automatic Generation of Cloze Question Distractors, In Second Language Studies: Acquisition, Learning, Education and Technology, SLaTE: the ISCA SIG on Speech and Language Technology in Edu, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, September 2010

 

            Dela Rosa, K., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Effect of Word Complexity on L2 Vocabulary Learning, Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies's 6th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (ACL-HLT: BEA 2011). 2011. pdf file

 

Dela Rosa, K., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Self-Assessment of Motivation: Explicit and Implicit Indicators in L2 Vocabulary Learning, Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2011). pdf file


Dela Rosa, K., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Impact of Word Sense Disambiguation on Ordering Dictionary Definitions in Vocabulary Learning Tutors, Proceedings of the 24th International FLAIRS Conference (FLAIRS 2011). pdf file

 

Skory, A., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Generation of Educational Content through Gameplay, Proc. SLaTE2011, Venice, August 2011. .pdf file

 

M. Heilman, K. Collins-Thompson, M. Eskenazi, A. Juffs, L. Wilson.  2010. Personalization of Reading Passages Improves Vocabulary Acquisition.  International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education,  Vol. 20 (1).

 

            Dela Rosa, K., Parent, G. ,Eskenazi, M., 2010, Multimodal learning of words: A study on the use of speech synthesis to reinforce written text in L2 language learning, Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2010) pdf file

 

Skory, A. and Eskenazi, M. (2010), Predicting Cloze Quality for Vocabulary Training, Proc. of NAACL HLT Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, Los Angeles, California. pdf file

 

Skory, A. and Eskenazi, M. (2010), Automatic Selection of Collocations for Instruction, Proc. of SLaTE Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education, Tokyo, Japan pdf

 file

Marujo, l., Lopes, J., Mamede, N., Trancoso, I, Pino, J., Eskenazi, M., Baptista, J., Viana, C., Porting REAP to European Portuguese, Proceedings ISCA Workshop on Speech and Language for Education SLaTE2009, Warwickshire England. pdf file

Pino, J., Eskenazi, M., 2009, Semi-Automatic Generation of Cloze Question Distractors: Effect of Students’ L1, Proceedings ISCA Workshop on Speech and Language for Education SLaTE2009, Warwickshire England. pdf file

Pino, J., Eskenazi, M., 2009, Measuring Hint Level in Open Cloze Questions, Proceedings FLAIRS09. pdf file

Pino, J., Eskenazi, M., 2009, An Application of Latent Semantic Analysis to Word Sense Discrimination for Words with Related and Unrelated Meanings, Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications at NAACL, Boulder Colorado. pdf file

M. Heilman and M. Eskenazi. 2008. Self-assessment in vocabulary tutoring. In Proc. of the Young Researcher's Track. Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. pdf file

J. Pino, M. Heilman, and M. Eskenazi. 2008. A selection strategy to improve cloze question quality. In Proc. of the Workshop on Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-Defined Domains. Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring System. pdf file

M. Heilman, K. Collins-Thompson, and M. Eskenazi. 2008. An analysis of statistical models and features for reading difficulty prediction. In Proc. of The 3rd Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications. pdf file

M. Heilman, L. Zhao, J. Pino, and M. Eskenazi. 2008. Retrieval of reading materials for vocabulary and reading practice. In Proc. of the 3rd Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications. pdf file

M. Heilman and M. Eskenazi. 2007. Application of automatic thesaurus extraction for computer generation of vocabulary questions. In Proc. of the SLaTE Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education. pdf file 

M. Heilman, A. Juffs, and M. Eskenazi. 2007. Choosing reading passages for vocabulary learning by topic to increase intrinsic motivation. In Proc. of AIED. pdf file

M. Heilman, K. Collins-Thompson, J. Callan, and M. Eskenazi. 2007. Combining lexical and grammatical features to improve readability measures for first and second language texts. In Proc. NAACL-HLT. pdf file

Callan, J., Eskenazi, M., Perfetti, C., 2006, Progress in Providing Reader-Specific lexical Practice for Improved Reading Comprehension, presented at IES 2006 research conference, June 15-16 2006, Washington DC

             Juffs, A., Eskenazi, M., Wilson, L., Pelletreau, T., Sanders, J., Callan, J., Brown, J., 2006, Promoting robust learning of vocabulary through computer assisted language learning, Proc. Joint conference of AAAL and ACLA/CAAL 2006, Montreal, June 2006.

             Juffs, A., Wilson, L., Eskenazi, M., Callan, J., Brown, J., Collins-Thompson, K., Heilman, M., Pelletreau, T., Sanders, J., 2006, Robust learning of vocabulary: investigating the relationship between learner behaviour and the acquisition of vocabulary (poster). At The 40th Annual TESOL Convention and Exhibit (TESOL 2006).

Brown, J., Eskenazi, M., 2006, Using Simulated Students for the Assessment of Authentic Document Retrieval, ITS2006, Taiwan, June 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Editors:  Mitsuru Ikeda, Kevin D. Ashley, Tak-Wai Chan, Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 685 – 688. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11774303_68

Heilman, M., Eskenazi, M., 2006, Language Learning: Challenges for Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Workshop on Ill-defined Domains in Intelligent Tutoring, Taiwan, June 2006. .pdf file

Heilman, M., Collins-Thompson, K., Callan, J., Eskenazi, M., 2006, Classroom Success of an Intelligent Tutoring System for Lexical Practice and Reading Comprehension, Proc. Interspeech2006, Pittsburgh September 2006. .pdf file

J. Brown, G. Frishkoff, and M. Eskenazi. (2005). "Automatic question generation for vocabulary assessment." In Proceedings of HLT/EMNLP 2005. Vancouver, B.C.  .pdf file

J. Brown and M. Eskenazi. (2005). "Student, text and curriculum modeling for reader-specific document retrieval." In Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2005. Phoenix, AZ.  .pdf file

Brown, J., Eskenazi, M., 2004, Retrieval of Authentic Documents for Reader-Specific Lexical Practice, Proceedings INSTIL 2004, Venice Italy. .pdf file

     Non-native speech

            Correia, R., Pellegrini, T, Eskenazi, M., Trancoso, I, Baptisa, J., Mamede, N., 2011, Listening Comprehension Games for Portuguese: exploring the best features, Proceedings SLaTE 2011. pdf file

Eskenazi, M., Raux, A., Harris, E., 2006, “Using speech recognition for just-in-time language learning, J. Acoust. Soc. Am, vol 120, no. 5, pt.2, p.3138. THE SLIDES FROM MY TALK ARE HERE

         Raux, A., Eskenazi, M., 2004, Using Task-Oriented Spoken Dialogue Systems for Language Learning: Potential, Practical Applications and Challenges, Proceedings INSTIL 2004, Venice.   .pdf file

         Raux, A., Eskenazi, M., 2004, Non-native users in the Let’s Go!! Spoken Dialogue System: Dealing with Linguistic Mismatch, Proceedings HLT 2004, Boston.    .pdf file

Raux, A., Langner, B., Black. A., Eskenazi. M., 2003, LET’S GO: Improving Spoken Dialog Systems for the Elderly and Non-natives, Proc. Eurospeech 2003, Denver.    .pdf file

      Pronunciation Training

            Saz, O., Eskenazi, M., Identifying Confusable Contests for Automatic Generation of Activities in Second Language Pronunciation Training, Proceedings SLaTE 2011, Venice. pdf file

Probst, K., Ke, Y., Eskenazi, M., 2002, Enhancing foreign language tutors - in search of the golden speaker, Speech Communication, 37/3-4 pp. 161-173.

         Eskenazi, M., Pelton, G. 2002, Pinpointing pronunciation errors in children’s speech: examining the role of the speech recognizer, Proposed to the Pronunciation Modeling and Lexicon Adaptation for Spoken Language Technology Workshop, Sept 2002, Colorado.    .pdf file

         Eskenazi, M., Ke, M., Albornoz, J., Probst, K.,  2000. Update on the Fluency Pronunciation Trainer, In: Proceedings of InSTIL 2000, Dundee.    .pdf file

         Mayfield Tomokiyo, L., Wang, L., Eskenazi, M., 2000, An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of Speech-Recognition-based Pronunciation Training, Proc. ICSLP 2000, Beijing.   

         Eskenazi, M., (1999) Issues in the use of speech recognition for foreign language tutors, invited paper: Language Learning and Technology Journal (online) Vol. 2, No. 2, January 1999, pp. 62-76.    http://llt.msu.edu/vol2num2/article3/index.html

         Eskenazi, M., Hansma, S., 1998, The Fluency Pronunciation Trainer, Proc. STiLL Workshop on Speech Technology in Language Learning, Marhollmen, May.     .pdf file

         Eskenazi, M., Hansma, S., Semp, M., Warner, R., 1998, By ear and by eye - adaptive tutoring for foreign language pronunciation training – in Proc. STiLL Workshop on Speech Technology in Language Learning Marhollmen. .pdf file

Data collection and assessment

         Parent, G. and Eskenazi, M. 2010. Clustering dictionary definitions using Amazon Mechanical Turk. In Proc. of the NAACL/HLT workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data With Amazon's Mechanical Turk. pdf file

Eskenazi, M., Rudnicky, A., Gregory, K., Constantinides, P., Brennan, R., Bennett, C., Allen, J., 1998, Data Collection and Processing in the Carnegie Mellon Communicator, in Proc. ESCA Eurospeech 98. . .pdf file

         M. Eskenazi, 1996, KIDS: A Database of Children's Speech , in Proc. 3rd joint Meeting: Acoustical Societies of America and Japan, Honolulu.

         Eskenazi, M., Hogan, C., Allen, J., Frederking, R., 1998, Issues in database design: Recording and processing speech from new populations, Proc. LREC Assessment and Database Workshop, Grenada, Spain.

         Lamel, L.,  Gauvain, JL., Eskenazi, M., 1991, BREF, a Large Vocabulary Spoken Corpus for French, in Proc. EUROSPEECH-91

         AFNOR, 1990, norme experimentale S 31-115, Evaluation de systemes de traitement automatique de la parole Partie 1: Definitions et methode d'evaluation de systemes de reconnaissance automatique de la parole - systemes de reconnaissance globale.

Elderly speech

         Eskenazi. M., Black, A., Simmons, R., 2002, Elderly Perception of Speech from a Computer, Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Pittsburgh, June 2002.    .pdf file

         Eskenazi, M., Black, A., 2001. A study on speech over the telephone and aging, Proc. Eurospeech01, Aalborg, Denmark September 2001. html link

Speaking Styles

         Eskenazi, M. 1993. Trends in Speaking Style Research, Keynote speech, Proceedings Eurospeech’93, Berlin.  .pdf file

         Eskenazi, M., 1995, Hot Topics in Speaking Style Research, in European Studies in Phonetics and Speech Communication, Bloothooft, Hazan, Huber, Llisterri, eds., OTS Publications, The Netherlands. P. 58 - 62.

         Eskenazi, M., Lacheret, A., 1991, Exploration of individual strategies in continuous speech, Speech Communication, vol. 10 no. 3.

         Eskenazi, M. 1992. Changing speech styles, speakers’ strategies in read speech and careful and casual spontaneous speech. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Banff.

Cochlear Implants

         Eskenazi, M., Vormes, E., Monguillot, G., Frachet, B., 1993, A new training and assessment technique for cochlear implants, in Advances in Cochlear Implants, Hochmair-Desoyer and Hochmair eds., International Science Seminars, Vienna, Austria, p. 572-577.

- Teaching

   * Speech class: 11-752 Production, Prosody and Synthesis taught with Alan Black 11-752 course description

   * Language Technologies: 11-717 Language Technologies for Computer-Assisted Language Learning taught with Lori Levin and Teruko Mitamura 11-717 course description

A book chapter on the material in 11-717:

Eskenazi, M., Brown, J., 2006, Teaching the Creation of Software that Uses Speech Recognition, in Teacher Education in CALL, P. Hubbard and M. Levy Eds., Language Learning and Language Teaching series, John Benjamins Publishing.

Here is an informal course I teach on how to write a scientific paper.

Session 1

 

Resources

Here are some things that may be of interest to you.

  1. Grapheme to Phoneme dictionary
  2. NEW FINDINGS IN LANGUAGE LEARNING
  3. FAUX AMIS

1. GRAPHEME_TO-PHONEME DICTIONARY: I am one of the people who has worked on CMUDICT a large grapheme-to-phoneme dictionary containing over 130,000 entries. CMUDICT can be used for a variety of applications and research topics. It is distributed as open source software and can be found at: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict 

2. NEW FINDINGS IN LANGUAGE LEARNING: One of the most promising directions that I know of for language learning is the one that started with D. Pisoni, A. Bradlow (Northwestern) and R. Yamada (ATR). They create pairs of sounds (R and L for Japanese learners of English) and acoustically “pull them apart” until the student can hear the difference between them. Students for whom this training works often can pronounce a new sound without having pronunciation training on it.

3. FAUX AMIS: I compiled a list of words that appear to be the same, but have very different meanings in French and English. The list is available here and if you find other entries or would like to suggest modifications or corrections, please download and let me know. I will be glad to post your comments and make changes to the list for all to use.  .doc file Eventually I will add the meanings!