INTERSPEECH 2013 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Lyon, France August 25-29, 2013

Pronunciation Errors by Spanish Learners of Dutch: A Data-Driven Study for ASR-Based Pronunciation Training

Pepi Burgos, Catia Cucchiarini, Roeland van Hout, Helmer Strik

Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, The Netherlands

In this paper we report on a study on pronunciation errors by Spanish learners of Dutch, which was aimed at obtaining information to develop a dedicated Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) program for this fixed language pair (Spanish L1, Dutch L2). The results of our study indicate, that, first, vowel errors are more frequent and variable than consonant mispronunciations. Second, Spanish natives appear to have problems with vowel length, vowel height, and front rounded vowels. Third, they tend to fall back on the pronunciation of their L1 vowels.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Burgos, Pepi / Cucchiarini, Catia / Hout, Roeland van / Strik, Helmer (2013): "Pronunciation errors by Spanish learners of Dutch: a data-driven study for ASR-based pronunciation training", In INTERSPEECH-2013, 2385-2389.