INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Phoneme Level Non-Native Pronunciation Analysis by an Auditory Model-Based Native Assessment Scheme

Christos Koniaris, Olov Engwall

KTH, Sweden

We introduce a general method for automatic diagnostic evaluation of the pronunciation of individual non-native speakers based on a model of the human auditory system trained with native data stimuli. For each phoneme class, the Euclidean geometry similarity between the native perceptual domain and the non-native speech power spectrum domain is measured. The problematic phonemes for a given second language speaker are found by comparing this measure to the Euclidean geometry similarity for the same phonemes produced by native speakers only. The method is applied to different groups of non-native speakers of various language backgrounds and the experimental results are in agreement with theoretical findings of linguistic studies.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Koniaris, Christos / Engwall, Olov (2011): "Phoneme level non-native pronunciation analysis by an auditory model-based native assessment scheme", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 1157-1160.