This paper investigates what voice features (e.g., speech rate and pitch-formants) make a teacher’s voice preferable for second language learners to imitate, when they practice sentence pronunciation using Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems. The CAPT system employed in our investigation uses a single teacher’s voice as the source to automatically resynthesize several sample...

Children today use computer based application in various activities especially for learning and education. Many of these tools and application such as the Computer Aided Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems enable children to explore and experience them with little supervision from the adults. In order for these tools and application to have maximum effect on the children’s learning and educat...

Lexical stress plays an important role in the prosody of German, and presents a considerable challenge to native speakers of languages such as French who are learning German as a foreign language. These learners stand to benefit greatly from Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems which can offer individualized corrective feedback on such errors, and reliable automatic detection...

We propose a novel decision tree based approach to Mandarin tone assessment. In most conventional computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) scenarios a tone production template is prepared as a reference with only numeric scores as feedbacks for tone learning. In contrast decision trees trained with an annotated tone-balanced corpus make use of a collection of questions related to importa...

Computer assisted language learning (CAPT) has been shown to be effective for learning non-natives pronunciation details of a new language. No automatic pronunciation evaluation system exists for non-native Norwegian. We present initial experiments on the Norwegian quantity contrast between short and long vowels. A database of native and non-native speakers was recorded for training and test re...

This paper is organized around two main endeavours. On the one hand, we examine currently available Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems with a view to establishing whether they meet pedagogically sound requirements. In this respect, we show that many commercial systems tend to prefer technological novelties to the detriment of pedagogical criteria that could benefit the lear...

The scarcity of large-scale non-native corpora and human annotations are two fundamental challenges in the development of computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) systems. We explored several transfer learning based methods to detect the pronunciation errors without using nonnative training data. Effects were confirmed in the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation error detection of Japanese spe...

Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training System (CAPT) has become an important learning aid in second language (L2) learning. Our approach to CAPT is based on the use of phonological rules to capture language transfer effects that may cause mispronunciations. This paper presents an approach for automatic derivation of phonological rules from L2 speech. The rules are used to generate an extended...