A CALL (computer-aided language learning) system was developed for teaching the pronunciation of Japanese double-mora phonemes to nonnative speakers of Japanese. Long vowels and short vowels are spectrally almost identical but their phone durations differ significantly. Similar conditions exist between mora nasals and non-mora nasals, and between mora and non-mora obstruents. Our CALL system asks the learner to read minimal pairs. Speech recognition technology is used to measure the durations of each phone and the system tells the learner the likelihood of native speakers understanding the learner's utterance as the learner intended. These intelligibility scores are based on perception experiments where native speakers judged the confusability of minimal pairs containing phones with various synthesized durations. The system then instructs the learner to either shorten or lengthen his pronunciation. The learner can terminate training when his communicative performance has met his expectations. Learning experiments show that learners quickly capture the relevant duration cues.
Cite as: Kawai, G., Hirose, K. (1998) A call system using speech recognition to teach the pronunciation of Japanese tokushuhaku. Proc. ETRW on Speech Technology in Language Learning (STiLL), 73-76
@inproceedings{kawai98_still,
author={Goh Kawai and Keikichi Hirose},
title={{A call system using speech recognition to teach the pronunciation of Japanese tokushuhaku}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. ETRW on Speech Technology in Language Learning (STiLL)},
pages={73--76}
}