Development of assisting system for learning Chinese aspirated sounds

Abstract

Chinese aspirates are generally difficult for Japanese to pronounce and perceive. In order to assist Japanese students to learn Chinese, the authors attempt to build a system to automatically evaluate the pronunciation of Chinese aspirates by Japanese students. To do so, this study analyzed 21 single‐vowel syllables of six different Chinese aspirates, bilabial, alveolar, velar, palatal, retroflex, and dental using two evaluation parameters: the voice onset time (VOT) and mean breathing power during VOT. The speech materials were uttered by nine Japanese students and nine native Chinese speakers. It is found that for a give aspirate, the longer the VOT is, the better the score is, as is generally said. But we found that an aspirate with a larger breathing power acquires good mark even with a shorter VOT in a certain range of VOT. The testing results showed that a combination of these two parameters can distinguish aspirated and unaspirated sounds quite well. To achieve an assisting system, we developed a m...