gnition and processing technology has been demonstrated by a number of research and commercial laboratories in the area of ​​pronunciation training. Voice-interactive pronunciation tutors prompt students to repeat spoken words and phrases or to read aloud sentences in the target language for the purpose of practicing both the sounds and the intonation of the language. The key to teaching pronunciation successfully is corrective feedback, more specifically, a type of feedback that does not rely on the student's own perception. A number of experimental systems have implemented automatic pronunciation scoring as a means to evaluate spoken learner productions in terms of fluency, segmental quality (phonemes) and supra-segmental features (intonation). The automatically generated proficiency score can then be used as a basis for providing other modes of corrective feedback. We discuss segmental and supra-segmental feedback in more detail below.
Segmental Feedback. Technically, designing a voice-interactive pronunciation tutor goes beyond the state of the art required by commercial dictation systems. While the grammar and vocabulary of a pronunciation tutor is comparatively simple, the underlying speech processing technology tends to be complex since it must be customized to recognize and evaluate the disfluent speech of language learners. A conventional speech recognizer is designed to generate the most charitable reading of a speaker's utterance. Acoustic models are generalized so as to accept and recognize correctly a wide range of different accents and pronunciations. A pronunciation tutor, by contrast, must be trained to both recognize and correct subtle deviations from standard native pronunciations.
A number of techniques have been suggested for automatic recognition and scoring of non-native speech (Bernstein, 1997; Franco, Neumeyer, Kim, & Ronen, 1997; Kim, Franco, & Neumeyer, 1997; Witt & Young, 1997). In general terms, the procedure consists of building native pronunciation models and then measuring the non-native responses against the native models. This requires models trained on both native and non-native speech data in the target language, and supplemented by a set of algorithms for measuring acoustic variables that have proven useful in distinguishing native from non-native speech. These variables include response latency, segment duration, inter-word pauses (in phrases), spectral likelihood, and fundamental frequency (F0). Machine scores are calculated from statistics derived from comparing non-native values ​​for these variables to the native models.
In a final step, machine generated pronunciation scores are validated by correlating these scores with the judgment of human expert listeners. As one would expect, the accuracy of scores increases with the duration of the utterance to be evaluated. Stanford Research Institute (SRI) has demonstrated a 0.44 correlation between machine scores and human scores at the phone level. At the sentence level, the machine-human correlation was 0.58, and at the speaker level it was 0.72 for a total of 50 utterances per speaker (Franco et al., 1997; Kim et al., 1997). These results compare with 0.55, 0.65, and 0.80 for phone, utterance, and speaker level correlation between human graders. A study conducted at Entropic shows that based on about 20 to 30 utterances per speaker and on a linear combination of the above techniques, it is possible to obtain machine-human grader correlation levels as high as 0.85 (Bernstein, 1997). p> Others have used expert knowledge about systematic pronunciation errors made by L2 adult learners in order to diagnose and correct such errors. One such system is the European Community project SPELL for automated assessment and improvement of foreign language pronunciation (Hiller, Rooney, Vaughan, Eckert, Laver, & Jack, 1994). This system uses advanced speech processing and recognition technologies to assess pronunciation errors by L2 learners of English (French or Italian speakers) and provide immediate corrective feedback. One technique for detecting consonant errors induced by inter-language transfer was to include students 'L1 pronunciations into the grammar network. In addition to the English/th/sound, for example, the grammar network also includes/t/or/s /, that is, errors typical of non-native Italian speakers of English. This system, although quite simple in the use of ASR technology, can be very effective in diagnosing and correcting known problems of L1 interference. However, it is less effective in detecting rare and more idiosyncratic pronunciation errors. Furthermore, it assumes that the phonetic system of the target language (eg, English) can be accurately mapped to the learners 'native language (e.g., Italian). While this assumption may work well for an Italian learner of English, it certainly does not for a Chinese learner; that i...
