Parroting exercises in a foreign language are designed to make a student's speech more native-like through imitation of specific native speech templates. In this paper we describe novel template-based methods for automatically estimating subjective scores for both intonation and rhythm in nonnative English. In terms of accuracy when automatically classifying a parroting speaker as a native or a learner, experimental results show that these new rhythm and intonation scores outperform similar baselines from nonnative speech assessment literature, and that they offer complementary discriminatory information when combined with automatic segment-level pronunciation scores, reaching a maximum classification accuracy of 89.8% on a corpus of parroting exercises. This suggests the general usefulness of these new scores in automatically assessing nonnative pronunciation in a computer-assisted pronunciation practice scenario.
Index Terms— nonnative speech, pronunciation evaluation, suprasegmental features, second-language acquisition
Cite as: Tepperman, J., Stanley, T., Hacioglu, K., Pellom, B. (2010) Testing suprasegmental English through parroting. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 898
@inproceedings{tepperman10_speechprosody,
author={Joseph Tepperman and Theban Stanley and Kadri Hacioglu and Bryan Pellom},
title={{Testing suprasegmental English through parroting}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 898}
}