Automatic pronunciation evaluation of language learners' utterances generated through shadowing

Abstract

In foreign language learning, shadowing has been used as a method for improving speaking and listening ability. In this method, learners are required to repeat a presented native utterance as closely and quickly as possible. Since learners have to follow the speaking rate of the presented utterance, their pronunciation often becomes very inarticulate and unintelligible. These features of shadowing make it very difficult to build a reliable scoring system for shadowing productions. In this paper, two techniques are proposed and investigated for automatic scoring of shadowing productions. Experiments show that good correlations are found between automatic scores and TOEIC overall proficiency scores. Index Terms: shadowing, automatic scoring, articulatory effort, goodness of pronunciation, bottom-up clustering