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ISCA International Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2009)Wroxall Abbey Estate, Warwickshire, England |
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ISCA International Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2009)Wroxall Abbey Estate, Warwickshire, England |
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The STRAIGHT system of voice morphing was used to create voice continua of (Korean)
accented Australian
English, intended to simulate phonetic variation ranging from ‘heavily accented’ to
‘unaccented’ (native-like)
Australian English, employing dimensions of intra-speaker and cross-speaker variation to
yield a range of
synthetic voices. These synthetic voices were evaluated against actual samples of Korean
accented English,
both re-synthesized and non-re-synthesized, in a series of three perceptual rating
experiments by native
listeners of Australian English. The questions of central interest in this preliminary
investigation are:
(a) the method of creating the phonetic continua and the respective roles of intra- versus
cross-speaker
variability in simulating degrees of foreign accent, (b) the success of the STRAIGHT
method for creating
hybrid voices, compared with ‘natural’ tokens of accented utterances, and (c) the impact
of the re-synthesis
method (required for voice morphing) upon perceptual ratings of foreign accent by native listeners.
The ultimate objective of this research is to assess the impact of
segmental and prosodic features on
the perception of foreign accent and intelligibility of L2 learners’ speech, where the
source (Korean) and
target (English) languages pose significant difficulties of segmental and prosodic transfer.
Bibliographic reference. Ingram, John / Mixdorff, Hansjörg / Kwon, Nahyun (2009): "Voice morphing and the manipulation of intra-speaker and cross-speaker phonetic variation to create foreign accent continua: a perceptual study", In SLaTE-2009, 145-148.