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.
Cite as: Auberg, S., Correa, N., Rothenberg, M., Shanahan, M. (1998) Vowel and intonation training in an English pronunciation tutor. Proc. ETRW on Speech Technology in Language Learning (STiLL), 69-72
@inproceedings{auberg98_still,
author={Stefan Auberg and Nelson Correa and Martin Rothenberg and Mark Shanahan},
title={{Vowel and intonation training in an English pronunciation tutor}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. ETRW on Speech Technology in Language Learning (STiLL)},
pages={69--72}
}