A computer-assisted prosody pronunciation teaching system

Work in the last decade shows, that Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Teaching (CAPT) systems are useful, flexible tools for giving pronunciation instructions and evaluating at subject’s speech. This paper describes a newly developed CAPT system that intends to address appropriate teaching of such supra-segmental parameters as intonation, stress and speech rhythm. Two modules are implemented: (1) intonation and stress teaching, and (2) rhythm teaching using dynamic time warping. The automatic feedback of the system is evaluated by using speech samples from hard of hearing children. The automatic assessment methods give automatic feedback that is consistent with the subjective decisions of teachers. Visual feedback was also proposed which is based on the dynamic time warping algorithm and gives simple and understandable visualization of the intonation and rhythm of the subject’s utterance.