12 Aug 2003

Nobuaki Minematsu (University of Tokyo; Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm)

Two new techniques are proposed to characterize the accented pronunciation. The first technique, Phonetic Tree Analysis, extracts phonetic tree structure embedded in utterances of a student. Results of analyzing Japanese English visually and clearly present well-known Japanese habits in speaking English. The second technique automatically estimates the segmental intelligibility not based upon acoustic matching with native speakers' utterances but based upon matching between two structures, the extracted phonetic structure in the student's pronunciation and the lexical structure in the target language's vocabulary. The estimation is done using one of word perception models, Cohort Model, and the estimated cohort size is interpreted as degree of the segmental unintelligibility. Experimental results show good accordance between the estimated intelligibility and the segmental proficiency rated by teachers. Further, some possible applications are also shown based upon the proposed two techniques.

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