ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993

Training vowel pronunciation using a computer-aided teaching system

Edmund Rooney, Rebecca Vaughan, Steven Hiller, Fabrizio Carraro, John Laver

This paper describes the treatment of vowels within SPELL, a computer-aided system for teaching pronunciation to foreign language learners. Vowel features in English, French and Italian are taught using an analysis based on formant extraction and between-speaker normalization. Graphical feedback shows the relationship between students' tokens and ideal vowel 'targets', constructed from native speaker data. Further work is planned to develop analysis techniques and feedback utilities for French nasal vowels, French front rounded vowels and the diphthongs of English and Italian.

Keywords: Pronunciation Training, Phonetics, Vowel, Teaching Aids, Speech Technology