The STAR system: An interactive pronunciation tutor for young children

Abstract

Between 1990 and 1998, the Speech Research Unit at the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), and Hereford and Worcester County Council Education Department, a U.K. local education authority, conducted research into the use of speech recognition technology in an interactive computer-based pronunciation tutor for 5-7 year-old primary school children. The goal of the project was to develop a robust, autonomous system that would enable a child to practice the pronunciation of a given set of words by speaking them to a computer, which provided immediate feedback on whether the pronunciation was acceptable. This paper describes the development of the underlying speech recognition technology, the prototype real-time system which was developed, and the results of pilot trials of the system in a U.K. primary school. © 2000 Academic Press.