Comparison of native and non-native evaluations of the naturalness of Japanesewords with prosody modified through voice morphing
نویسندگان
چکیده
Information on what kinds of mispronunciation cause the greatest loss in naturalness can be used in guidance to help learners achieve their goals of speaking with good pronunciation. We recorded Japanese words spoken by bilinguals in Tokyo Japanese and in foreign accents (English and Korean) and morphed them together with STRAIGHT emphasizing different acoustic parameters. By using STRAIGHT, we can simulate a wide variety of English-accented and Korean-accented pronunciations of Japanese. Then, we had native Japanese speakers and non-native speakers (Australian) evaluate the naturalness of these morphed utterances. The experimental results showed that Australian learners were very insensitive to the difference between native and non-native pitch although Japanese speakers were critically sensitive to these errors. Following these results, we give some pedagogical suggestions on what kind of pronunciation guidance is necessary for learners to become aware of what is unnatural to native speakers.
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