An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of Speech-Recognition-Based Pronunciation Training

摘要

We have tested a fixed version of the Fluency foreign language pronunciation trainer to determine whether users actually improve their pronunciation through its use. The Fluency system uses the CMU SPHINX II speech recognizer to pinpoint pronunciation errors and then gives suggestions as to how to correct them. Users in the experiment we will describe in this paper were to learn to pronounce the voiced and voiceless interdental fricatives /#theta#/ and /#delta#/, as in "thin" and "that". The choice of these two phones alowed us to attract users from several native languages. In this paper, we present the resutls of this study, fully describing the test situation and drawing conclusions about Fluency as a testbed.