Phonetics and Speech Sciences (말소리와 음성과학)

Korean Society of Speech Sciences (한국음성학회)
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An evaluation of Korean students' pronunciation of an English passage by a speech recognition application and two human raters

  • Yang, Byunggon (Department of English Education, Pusan National University)
  • Received : 2020.10.20
  • Accepted : 2020.12.01
  • Published : 2020.12.31
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Abstract

This study examined thirty-one Korean students' pronunciation of an English passage using a speech recognition application, Speechnotes, and two Canadian raters' evaluations of their speech according to the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) band criteria to assess the possibility of using the application as a teaching aid for pronunciation education. The results showed that the grand average percentage of correctly recognized words was 77.7%. From the moderate recognition rate, the pronunciation level of the participants was construed as intermediate and higher. The recognition rate varied depending on the composition of the content words and the function words in each given sentence. Frequency counts of unrecognized words by group level and word type revealed the typical pronunciation problems of the participants, including fricatives and nasals. The IELTS bands chosen by the two native raters for the rainbow passage had a moderately high correlation with each other. A moderate correlation was reported between the number of correctly recognized content words and the raters' bands, while an almost a negligible correlation was found between the function words and the raters' bands. From these results, the author concludes that the speech recognition application could constitute a partial aid for diagnosing each individual's or the group's pronunciation problems, but further studies are still needed to match human raters.

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References

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