Measurement of Objective Intelligibility of Japanese Accented English Using ERJ (English Read by Japanese) Database

In many schools, English is taught as international communication tool and the goal of English pronunciation training is generally to acquire intelligible enough pronunciation, which is not always native-sounding pronunciation. However, the definition of the intelligible pronunciation is not easy because it depends on the speaking skill of a speaker, the predictability of a content, and the language background of a listener. One kind of accented pronunciation, which is intelligible enough for some listeners, is often less intelligible for others. This paper focuses on objective intelligibility of Japanese English through the ears of American English speakers with little exposure to Japanese English. A large listening test was conducted using ERJ (English Read by Japanese) database. A balanced subset of this database were presented over a telephone line to the American listeners who were asked to repeat what they heard. Totally, 17,416 repetitive responses were collected and they were transcribed manually. This paper describes the design of this experiment and some results of analyzing the results of transcription.