Abstract

Motivated by potential applications in second-language pedagogy, we present a novel approach to using articulatory information to improve automatic detection of typical phone-level errors made by nonnative speakers of English-a difficult task that involves discrimination between close pronunciations. We describe a reformulation of the hidden-articulator Markov model (HAMM) framework that is appropriate for the pronunciation evaluation domain. Model training requires no direct articulatory measurement, but rather involves a constrained and interpolated mapping from phone-level transcriptions to a set of physically and numerically meaningful articulatory representations. Here, we define two new methods of deriving articulatory-based features for classification: one, by concatenating articulatory recognition results over eight streams representative of the vocal tract's constituents; the other, by calculating …

Date

2007

Authors

Joseph Tepperman, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

IEEE transactions on audio, speech, and language processing

Volume

16

Issue

1

Pages

8-22

Publisher

IEEE