STiLL - Speech Technology in Language Learning May 25-27, 1998 Marholmen, Sweden

Vowel and Intonation Training in an English Pronunciation Tutor

Stefan Auberg, Nelson Correa, Martin Rothenberg, Mark Shanahan

Syracuse Language Systems, Syracuse, New York, USA

Vowel pronunciation and contrastive stress are two of the major difficulties faced by non-native speakers attempting to achieve effective oral communication. This paper presents our work on the vowel pronunciation and intonation modules of the Accent Coach, a multimedia-based English pronunciation tutor. The vowel module provides real-time visual feedback of pronunciation quality for sustained monophthong English vowels. The feedback is given in the form of a moving sprite on a 2D articulatory vowel diagram, where the sprite position is controlled by the speech input. The intonation module provides coordinated visual and auditory feedback on sentence intonation in a novel format as an aid in the development of proper patterns of contrastive sentence stress in sentences. The vowel module achieves 74% classification accuracy, while the intonation module agrees with F0 values derived from an electroglottograph signal.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Auberg, Stefan / Correa, Nelson / Rothenberg, Martin / Shanahan, Mark (1998): "Vowel and intonation training in an English pronunciation tutor", In STiLL-1998, 69-72.