ISCA International Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2009) Wroxall Abbey Estate, Warwickshire, England September 3-5, 2009

Islands of Failure: Employing Word Accent Information for Pronunciation Quality Assessment of English L2 Learners

Florian Hönig (1), Anton Batliner (1), Karl Weilhammer (2), Elmar Nöth (1)

1) Chair of Pattern Recognition, Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
(2) digital publishing, München, Germany

So far, applied research aiming at computer-assisted pronunciation training has normally concentrated on segmental aspects. Here, we present a database with realizations of nonnative English speakers with German, French, Spanish, and Italian as native language. We concentrate on the acoustic-prosodic modelling of word accent position and use a large prosodic feature vector to automatically recognize erroneous word accent positions produced by non-native English speakers.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hönig, Florian / Batliner, Anton / Weilhammer, Karl / Nöth, Elmar (2009): "Islands of failure: employing word accent information for pronunciation quality assessment of English L2 learners", In SLaTE-2009, 41-44.