Comprehensibility and prosody ratings for pronunciation software development

Abstract

SUMMARY In the context of developing software that would offer useful and effective feedback to Mandarin speaking learners of English on their pronunciation, we have assessed the relative importance of different speech features through the effect they have on the communicative quality of the utterance, measured by comprehensibility ratings. Such data are important to the issue of how to evaluate and fine-tune the acoustic information that the software derives from learner speech and subsequently uses in assessing learner performance. We have identified a number of issues that need to be addressed in developing pedagogical and software models for learner pronunciation instruction. It was clear that prosodic features have an important effect on comprehensibility, a finding that supports previous studies suggesting that time spent on such features is well justified (see supporting references discussed in our Introduction ). Rehearsal of prosodic features in a semi-communicative context can be provided through software that targets features that have the strongest effect on comprehensibility, and a conscious awareness of those features can be raised through a number of explanatory notes associated with the feedback that the software provides. Feedback, rehearsal, and language awareness are three learning opportunities that are well supported in curriculum development (Crabbe, 2003) .