Automatic Assessment of Prosody in Second Language Learning

Automatic Assessment of Prosody in Second Language Learning
Author: Florian Hönig
Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2017
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3832545670

Worldwide there is a universal need for second language language learning. It is obvious that the computer can be a great help for this, especially when equipped with methods for automatically assessing the learner's pronunciation. While assessment of segmental pronunciation quality (i.,e. whether phones and words are pronounced correctly or not) is already available in commercial software packages, prosody (i.e. rhythm, word accent, etc.) is largely ignored--although it highly impacts intelligibility and listening effort. The present thesis contributes to closing this gap by developing and analyzing methods for automatically assessing the prosody of non-native speakers. We study the detection of word accent errors and the general assessment of the appropriateness of a speaker's rhythm. We propose a flexible, generic approach that is (a) very successful on these tasks, (b) competitive to other state-of-the-art result, and at the same time (c) flexible and easily adapted to new tasks.

Assessment in Second Language Pronunciation

Assessment in Second Language Pronunciation
Author: Okim Kang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2017-07-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351692801

Assessment in Second Language Pronunciation highlights the importance of pronunciation in the assessment of second language speaking proficiency. Leading researchers from around the world cover practical issues as well as theoretical principles, enabling the understanding and application of the theory involved in assessment in pronunciation. Key features of this book include: Examination of key criteria in pronunciation assessment, including intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness; Exploration of the impact of World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca on pronunciation assessment; Evaluation of the validity and reliability of testing, including analysis of scoring methodologies; Discussion of current and future practice in assessing pronunciation via speech recognition technology. Assessment in Second Language Pronunciation is vital reading for students studying modules on pronunciation and language testing and assessment.

Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language

Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language
Author: Paulo Quaresma
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2020-02-24
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3030415058

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, PROPOR 2020, held in Evora, Portugal, in March 2020. The 36 full papers presented together with 5 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. They are grouped in topical sections on speech processing; resources and evaluation; natural language processing applications; semantics; natural language processing tasks; and multilinguality.

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody
Author: Carlos Gussenhoven
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 880
Release: 2020-12-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192568213

This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The last four decades have seen major theoretical and empirical breakthroughs in the field, many of them informed by interdisciplinary approaches, as reflected in this volume. Following an introductory section covering the fundamentals of language prosody research, Parts II and III trace out the position of prosody in linguistic structure and explore prosody in speech perception and production. Part IV provides overviews of prosodic systems across the world, with case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Pacific, and the Americas. The chapters in Parts V, VI, and VII investigate prosody in communication, in language processing, and in language acquisition, while Part VIII examines prosody in technology and the arts. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary perspectives will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.

Second Language Prosody and Computer Modeling

Second Language Prosody and Computer Modeling
Author: Okim Kang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2021-09-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 100043558X

This volume presents an interdisciplinary approach to the study of second language prosody and computer modeling. It addresses the importance of prosody’s role in communication, bridging the gap between applied linguistics and computer science. The book illustrates the growing importance of the relationship between automated speech recognition systems and language learning assessment in light of new technologies and showcases how the study of prosody in this context in particular can offer innovative insights into the computerized process of natural discourse. The book offers detailed accounts of different methods of analysis and computer models used and demonstrates how these models can be applied to L2 discourse analysis toward predicting real-world language use. Kang, Johnson, and Kermad also use these frameworks as a jumping-off point from which to propose new models of second language prosody and future directions for prosodic computer modeling more generally. Making the case for the use of naturalistic data for real-world applications in empirical research, this volume will foster interdisciplinary dialogues across students and researchers in applied linguistics, speech communication, speech science, and computer engineering.

Effects of Prosody-Based Instruction and Self-Assessment in L2 Speech Development

Effects of Prosody-Based Instruction and Self-Assessment in L2 Speech Development
Author: Yukie Saito
Publisher:
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) on prosody with or without self-assessment on the prosodic and global aspects of L2 speech by Japanese EFL learners using a pre-post design. In addition, native English speaking (NS) and non-native English speaking (NNS) raters with high levels of English proficiency were compared to examine the influence of raters' L1 backgrounds on their comprehensibility ratings. Sixty-one Japanese university students from four intact English presentation classes participated in the study. The comparison group (n = 16) practiced making one-minute speeches in class (45 minutes x 8 times) without explicit instruction on prosody, while the two experimental groups (n = 17 for the FFI-only group; n = 28 for the FFI + SA group) received FFI on word stress, rhythm, and intonation, practiced the target prosodic features in communicative contexts, and received metalinguistic feedback from the instructor. In total, the experimental groups received six-hours of instruction in class, which was comparable to the comparison group. Additionally, the experimental groups completed homework three times; only the FFI + SA group recorded their reading performance and self-assessed it in terms of word stress, rhythm, and intonation. Three oral tasks were employed to elicit the participants' speech before and after the treatment: reading aloud, one-minute speech, and picture description. The speech samples were rated for comprehensibility by NS and NNS raters and were also analyzed with four prosodic measurements: word stress, rhythm, pitch contour, and pitch range. Instructional effects on prosody were observed clearly. The FFI-only group improved their controlled production of rhythm and pitch contour, while the FFI + SA group significantly improved all of the prosodic features except pitch range. Moreover, the instructional gains for the FFI + SA group were not limited to the controlled task but transferred to the less-controlled tasks. The results showed differential instructional effects on the four prosodic aspects. The FFI in this study did not help the participants widen their pitch range. The FFI on prosody, which was focused on the cross-linguistic differences between Japanese and English, tended to be more effective in terms of improving rhythm and pitch contour, which were categorized as rule-based, than an item-based feature, word stress. The study offered mixed results regarding instructional effects on comprehensibility. The FFI-only group did not significantly improve comprehensibility despite their significant prosodic improvements on the reading aloud task. Their significant comprehensibility growth on the picture description task was not because of the development of prosody, but of other linguistic variables that influence comprehensibility such as speech rate. The FFI + SA group made significant gains for comprehensibility on the three tasks, but the effect sizes were small. This finding indicated that the effects of FFI with self-assessment on comprehensibility were limited due to the multi-faceted nature of comprehensibility. The data elicited from the post-activity questionnaires and students' interviews revealed that not all the participants in the FFI + SA group reacted positively to the self-assessment practice. Individual differences such as previous learning experience and self-efficacy appeared to influence the learners' perceptions of the self-assessment practice and possibly their instructional gains. The two groups of raters, L1 English raters (n = 6) and L2 English raters with advanced or native-like English proficiency (n = 6) did not differ in terms of consistency and severity. These findings indicated that NNS raters with high English proficiency could function as reliably as NS raters; however, the qualitative data revealed that the NS raters tended to be more sensitive to pronunciation, especially at the segmental level, across the three tasks compared to the NNS raters. This study provides evidence that FFI, especially when it is reinforced by self-assessment, has pedagogical value; it can improve learners' production of English prosody in controlled and less-controlled speech, and these gains can in turn contribute to enhanced L2 comprehensibility.

Automatic Assessment of Children Speech to Support Language Learning

Automatic Assessment of Children Speech to Support Language Learning
Author: Christian Hacker
Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2009
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3832522581

Focus of this work are pattern recognition related aspects of computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) for second language learning. An overview of commercial systems shows that pronunciation training is being addressed by the growing field of computer assisted language learning only to a small extend, although in the state-of-the-art section a number of such approaches for automatic assessment can already be presented. In the present thesis different approaches are extended and combined. In particular a large set of nearly 200 pronunciation and prosodic features is developed. By this approach pronunciation scoring is regarded as classification task in high-dimensional feature space. Automatic speech recognition is the basis of most pronunciation scoring algorithms. In this thesis a system is presented, which supports second language learning at school, i.e. the target users are children. For this reason a state-of-the-art speech recognition engine is adapted to children speech, since young speakers are only hardly recognised by automatic systems. Phonetically motivated rules for typical mispronunciation errors are integrated into the system to make it suitable for pronunciation scoring. Evaluating an algorithm for pronunciation assessment is more difficult than simply counting the correctly recognised mistakes, since there exists no objective ground truth. This can be shown by evaluating the annotations of 14 teachers. However, with different measures it can be verified that the accuracy of the system (in comparison with teachers) thoroughly reaches the agreement among teachers. The evaluation is conducted with native German speakers learning English.

Statistical Language and Speech Processing

Statistical Language and Speech Processing
Author: Luis Espinosa-Anke
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2020-09-25
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3030594300

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing, SLSP 2020, held in Cardiff, UK, in October 2020. The 13 full papers presented together with one invited paper in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions. They papers cover the wide spectrum of statistical methods that are currently in use in computational language or speech processing.

Pronunciation Models

Pronunciation Models
Author: Adam Brown
Publisher: NUS Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 1991
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789971691578

Most books on pronunciation teaching deal extensively with methodology, while giving insufficient attention to the prior questions of the model being used. This book discusses the what rather than the how. It examines critically the kinds of pronunciation model in use in ELT, in particular the Received Pronunciation accent, and shows that they are unsatisfactory in several respects. Various criteria for models are investigated, especially the concepts of intelligibility, identity, and functional load. The importance of features of the phonological system of English is assessed against these criteria, so that priorities are established for pronunciation models. This book is important reading for English language teachers, applied linguists, ELT textbook writers, language planners, speech therapists, and anyone involved in the instruction of the spoken form of English.