Even after years of study, language learners may have difficulty perceiving L2 sounds. For instance, Japanese listeners show difficulty differentiating American English /r/ and /l/. Previous research has shown that phonetic training may improve learners' perception of the contrast. While this training paradigm appears as a promising tool for language learning, its transition from the laboratory to the classroom needs to be facilitated. Not only does phonetic training require recording and/or manually editing many training exemplars, training sessions are also often long and repetitive. Given these obstacles, the long-term goal is to make phonetic training more applicable to real-life learning. In this preliminary study, we prototype a self-paced, web-based phonetic training program, featuring both identification and discrimination tasks as playable mini-games. Participants are trained using nonword minimal pairs (e.g., /lapu/-/rapu/), presented in isolation in clean speech. Their ability to identify the target phonemes is assessed before and after training, with stimuli also presented in noise and/or in sentences, to test perceptual robustness. We assess the effectiveness of the phonetic training game in its current form and discuss future improvements, notably in the context of using speech engineering to automate and augment High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) programs.
Cite as: Guevara-Rukoz, A., Martin, A., Yamauchi, Y., Minematsu, N. (2019) Prototyping a web-based phonetic training game to improve /r/-/l/ identification by Japanese learners of English. Proc. 8th ISCA Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2019), 20-24, doi: 10.21437/SLaTE.2019-5
@inproceedings{guevararukoz19_slate,
author={Adriana Guevara-Rukoz and Alexander Martin and Yutaka Yamauchi and Nobuaki Minematsu},
title={{Prototyping a web-based phonetic training game to improve /r/-/l/ identification by Japanese learners of English}},
year=2019,
booktitle={Proc. 8th ISCA Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2019)},
pages={20--24},
doi={10.21437/SLaTE.2019-5}
}