Auditory and Dynamic Modeling Paradigms to Detect L2 Mispronunciations

This paper expands our previous work on automatic pronunciation error detection that exploits knowledge from psychoacoustic auditory models. The new system has two additional important features, i.e., auditory and acoustic processing of the temporal cues of the speech signal, and classification feedback from a trained linear dynamic model. We also perform a pronunciation analysis by considering the task as a classification problem. Finally, we evaluate the proposed methods conducting a listening test on the same speech material and compare the judgment of the listeners and the methods. The automatic analysis based on spectro-temporal cues is shown to have the best agreement with the human evaluation, particularly with that of language teachers, and with previous plenary linguistic studies.