Large-scale characterization of non-native Mandarin Chinese spoken by speakers of European origin: Analysis on iCALL

Abstract

In this work, we analyze phonetic and prosodic pronunciation patterns from iCALL, a speech corpus designed to evaluate Mandarin mispronunciations by non-native speakers of European origin and to address the lack of large-scale, non-native corpora with comprehensive annotations for applications in CAPT (computer-assisted pronunciation training). iCALL consists of 90,841 utterances from 305 speakers with a total duration of 142 hours. The speakers are from diverse linguistic backgrounds (spanning Germanic, Romance, and Slavic native languages). The read utterances are phonetically balanced with phonetic, tonal, and fluency annotations. Our findings on iCALL reveal that lexical tone errors are over six times more prevalent than phonetic errors, French speakers are twice as likely to mispronounce Tone 2, 3, 4 when compared to English speakers, native Romance language speakers are more likely to make de-aspiration and aspiration mistakes, and fluency scores correlate inversely with tone and phone error rate.