Publisher Description

It’s important to be able to hear the difference between sounds in order to produce them accurately. Discriminating between sounds is often practised using ‘minimal pairs’. A minimal pair is a pair of words where only one sound is different, for example ‘pin’ versus ‘bin’.
The Minimal Pairs Tutor contains over 5,000 minimal pairs, complete with images and example pronunciations. It also encourages accurate speech production by recording your voice and providing feedback on your pronunciation.
Minimal pair lists
The Minimal Pairs Tutor contains over 500 minimal pair lists. Each list contains a series of minimal pairs that contrast two different sounds, for example /b/ versus /p/. You can also create your own minimal pair lists.
Contrasting minimal pairs
Once you’ve selected your list, you can contrast the minimal pairs by clicking on each image and listening to an example pronunciation.
Pronouncing minimal pairs
To encourage accurate speech production, the tutor lets you highlight minimal pairs with your voice. To highlight a particular word, simply click record and speak when prompted.
Once you’ve stopped speaking, the recognized word is automatically highlighted. If the correct word is not highlighted, press record and try again. You can practise each word as many times as you like.
In addition to highlighting the recognized word, a speech intelligibility score is displayed. This provides a measure of how well the word was pronounced.
Listening to your pronunciation
The Minimal Pairs Tutor also records your voice, so you can listen to your pronunciation and compare it to the example.
Who should use it?
The Minimal Pairs Tutor can be used by speech and language therapists or by their patients wishing to practice between sessions. It can also be used as an aid to learning the English language.

About Minimal Pairs Tutor

Minimal Pairs Tutor is a reliable and efficient application whose main purpose is to help you learn the proper pronunciation of words by practicing your speech and becoming more adept in telling the differences between certain sounds.

Minimal pairs are sets of words where only one sound differs from the other; they probably represent the best method of learning how to speak a foreign language. English is notoriously difficult because of the many rules and even more exceptions in terms of pronunciation.

Minimal Pairs Tutor features a simple and user-friendly interface that enables you to browse through the existing minimal pairs, using the arrows for ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’, then listen to their correct pronunciation by clicking on the image equivalent to the words you are reading, which can also help you acquire new vocabulary.

The utility features a variety of minimal pairs, grouped according to the main sound, such as ‘G’, ‘ZH’, ‘B’, ‘NG’, ‘TH’ and countless more, each comprising a wide range of contrasting pairs, like ‘R vs DH’, ‘G vs JH’, ‘SH vs T’, and others.

Additionally, the application allows you to create your own minimal pairs, by importing images and typing in the equivalent words. This way, you can enrich the library of entries, adding new or possible omitted pairs.

Moreover, Minimal Pairs Tutor enables you to record your own pronunciation of certain words and offers you information about the accuracy of your speech, even providing a score to let you know how well you are doing or if you need improving.

The program features several languages that you can choose from, not only English, but also Spanish, German, French and several others, but they require your Windows Speech Recognizer to contain the pronunciation for those languages.

To summarize, Minimal Pairs Tutor is a useful and reliable piece of software that provides you with the means to learn the correct pronunciation of a language, requiring a minimal amount of effort from you.

It’s important to be able to hear the difference between sounds in order to produce them accurately. Discriminating between sounds is often practiced using ‘minimal pairs’. A minimal pair is a pair of words where only one sound is different, for example ‘pin’ versus ‘bin’. Using speech recognition technology, the Minimal Pairs Tutor: 1) Helps you to contrast minimal pairs by providing example pronunciations. 2) Encourages accurate speech production by recording your voice and providing feedback on your pronunciation. 3) Contains over 5,000 minimal pairs, complete with images and example pronunciations.

Requirements:

Speech Recognition Engine

Limitations:

3-day trial