On the Benefit of Using Auditory Modeling for Diagnostic Evaluation of Pronunciations

In this paper we demonstrate that a psychoacoustic model-based distance measure performs better than a speech signal distance measure in assessing the pronunciation of individual foreign speakers. The experiments show that the perceptualbased method performs not only quantitatively better than a speech spectrum-based method, but also qualitatively better, hence showing that auditory information is beneficial in the task of pronunciation error detection. We first present the general approach of the method, which is using the dissimilarity between the native perceptual domain and the non-native speech power spectrum domain. The problematic phonemes for a given nonnative speaker are determined by the degree of disparity between the dissimilarity measure for the non-native and a group of native speakers. The two methods compared here are applied to different groups of non-native speakers of various language backgrounds and validated against a theoretical linguistic study.