Abstract

We are interested in automatically detecting specific phone segments that have been mispronounced by a nonnative student of a foreign language. The phone-level information allows a language instruction system to provide the student with feedback about specific pronunciation mistakes. Two approaches were evaluated; in the first approach, log-posterior probability-based scores [1] are computed for each phone segment. These probabilities are based on acoustic models of native speech. The second approach uses a phonetically labeled nonnative speech database to train two different acoustic models for each phone: one model is trained with the acceptable, or correct native-like pronunciations, while the other model is trained with the incorrect, strongly nonnative pronunciations. For each phone segment, a log-likelihood ratio score is computed using the incorrect and correct pronunciation models. Either type of score is compared with a phone dependent threshold to detect a mispronunciation. P...

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