Vowel-reduction feedback system for non-native learners of English

Jeesoo Bang, Kyusong Lee, Seonghan Ryu, Gary Geunbae Lee

Abstract: In spoken English, vowels in non-stressed syllables are often reduced to a brief neutral vowel (e.g, e or ι). Non-native speakers of English may not use this `vowel reduction' correctly, so their utterances may sound unnatural. We propose an automatic system to provide feedback about vowel-reduction to non-native speakers of English. The system has three parts: it predicts vowel reduction, detects vowel reduction in speech, compares the prediction to the detected sound to generate a score then uses this score to provide corrective feedback to the speaker. The system had good accuracy and provided positive learning results for the user. The proposed system can be used as a part of a computer-assisted language learning system.