Learning prosodic control for speaking Japanese is effective to reduce syntactic and lexical ambiguity and to improve the comprehensibility of learners’spoken Japanese. Good prosody can also improve its naturalness. In the conventional curriculum however, prosody training has not been provided satisfactorily for learners partly because of scarcity of teaching materials. To facilitate prosody training with speech technologies, we developed a web-based system called OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) [1] and in OJAD, a prosodic reading tutor of Japanese, Suzuki-kun, is provided. In the current paper, technical development of Suzuki-kun and its effectiveness is described. Experiments show that Suzukikun’s visualized prosody can help learners more effectively than model utterances.
Cite as: Minematsu, N. (2016) OJAD: Web-based Prosodic Reading Tutor of Japanese. Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2016), 15-21, doi: 10.21437/ISAPh.2016-3
@inproceedings{minematsu16_isaph,
author={Nobuaki Minematsu},
title={{OJAD: Web-based Prosodic Reading Tutor of Japanese}},
year=2016,
booktitle={Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2016)},
pages={15--21},
doi={10.21437/ISAPh.2016-3}
}