Islands of Failure: Employing word accent information for pronunciation quality assessment of English L2 learners

Abstract

So far, applied research aiming at computer-assisted pronunciation training has normally concentrated on segmental aspects. Here, we present a database with realizations of nonnative English speakers with German, French, Spanish, and Italian as native language. We concentrate on the acoustic-prosodic modelling of word accent position and use a large prosodic feature vector to automatically recognize erroneous word accent positions produced by non-native English speakers.