On the automatic comparison and cloning of native and non-native speech prosody

It is notoriously difficult to evaluate L2 prosody objectively, since there is little consensus as to what constitutes a correct prosody for a given utterance. This presentation describes an automatic procedure which consists in comparing a non-native speakers production with 10 instances of the same utterance, taken from the OMProDat database, and read by native speakers. The pitch and relative syllable durations of the native and non-native versions are normalised and compared and the version from the native speaker which is most closely correlated with that of the non-native speaker is chosen as a model. The normalised pitch and syllable durations of the native speakers recording can be cloned and transferred to the L2 utterance. The original and re-synthesised versions of the learners utterance can then be used to provide both visual and auditory feedback to the language learner.