Computer-aided spoken-language training with enhanced visual and auditory feedback

A tool developed for computer-aided training of spoken language is presented in the paper. The tool’s environment utilizes both visual and auditory feedback information to help a user in learning pronunciation and intonation in L1 or L2. The learning is supported by displaying the user’s speech and its relevant parameters (volume, F0 and spectrum) in parallel with multiple reference templates. The templates may belong to the same utterance or make a minimum pair that can be used for contrastive training. The time plots are accompanied by textual labels (phonemes, syllables or words) that are automatically aligned to the user’s utterance and by plots that identify the regions with major deviations with respect to the reference templates. The tool has been tested in two tasks: a) speech training of a deaf person and b) learning pronunciation and intonation in a foreign language.