A Study on Automatic Measurement of Pronunciation Accuracy of English Speech Produced by Korean Learners of English

한국인 영어 학습자의 발음 정확성 자동 측정방법에 대한 연구

The purpose of this project is to develop a device that can automatically measure pronunciation of English speech produced by Korean learners of English. Pronunciation proficiency will be measured largely in two areas; suprasegmental and segmental areas. In suprasegmental area, intonation and word stress will be traced and compared with those of native speakers by way of statistical methods using tilt parameters. Durations of phones are also examined to measure speakers' naturalness of their pronunciations. In doing so, statistical duration modelling from a large speech database using CART will be considered. For segmental measurement of pronunciation, acoustic probability of a phone, which is a byproduct when doing the forced alignment, will be a basis of scoring pronunciation accuracy of a phone. The final score will be a feedback to the learners to improve their pronunciation.