Abstract
Prosodic characteristics, such as lexical and phrasal stress, are one of the most challenging features for second language (L2) speakers to learn. The ability to quantify language learners’ proficiency in terms of prosody can be of use to language teachers and improve the assessment of L2 speaking skills. Automatic assessment, however, requires reliable automatic analyses of prosodic features that allow for the comparison between the productions of L2 speech and reference samples. In this paper we investigate whether signal-based syllable prominence can be used to predict the prosodic competence of Finnish learners of Swedish. Syllable-level prominence was estimated for 180 L2 and 45 native (L1) utterances by a continuous wavelet transform analysis using combinations of f0, energy, and duration. The L2 utterances were graded by four expert assessors using the revised CEFR scale for prosodic features. Correlations of prominence estimates for L2 utterances with estimates for L1 utterances and linguistic stress patterns were used as a measure of prosodic proficiency of the L2 speakers. The results show that the level of agreement conceptualized in this way correlates significantly with the assessments of expert raters, providing strong support for the use of the wavelet-based prominence estimation techniques in computer-assisted assessment of L2 speaking skills.
Highlights
Phonetic studies in second language (L2) production have hitherto focused on specific features such as difficult sounds or intonation patterns
We introduce a new automatic method for measuring and quantifying prominence based on continuous wavelet transform (Suni, Šimko, Aalto, & Vainio, 2017)
In order to evaluate consistency among the native speakers, we calculated the correlations between the prominence estimates for each pair of L1 speakers and each sentence, separately for every wavelet-based prominence estimation method
Summary
Phonetic studies in second language (L2) production have hitherto focused on specific features such as difficult sounds or intonation patterns. Studies have shown that L2 learners have difficulties especially in speech rhythm and tonal features (Adams, 1979; Archibald, 1997; Broselow, 1988; Grosser, 1997; Guion, 2005; Wennerström, 1998) Many of these prosodic difficulties stem from incorrect production of stress; appropriate placement of word-level and phrasal stress is important in chunking speech into linguistically relevant units, and chunking creates the (perceivable and languagespecific) rhythm in speech. A stress-bearing syllable is typically characterized by an increase in f 0, duration, and intensity (Lieberman, 1967; Lehiste, 1969; Fant & Kruckenberg, 1994; Cruttenden, 1997; Fant, Kruckenberg, & Liljencrants, 2000; Suomi & Ylitalo, 2004; Vainio & Järvikivi, 2006) While these signal characteristics combine in a complex and language dependent manner, the overall increase can be quantified in terms of syllable prominence.
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