Detection of foreign speakers' pronunciation errors for second language training-preliminary results

With the present generation of speech recognizers dealing with speaker-independent continuous speech and medium-sized vocabularies, the possibilities for their application are becoming larger, and yet some applications have not yet been tried, or have been tried with heavy constraints on the user, due to the expected poor recognition performance, and the lack of results to date in the domain of prosody has severely limited the use of that information. The author thinks that researchers may be overly pessimistic. She explores the possibility of using Carnegie Mellon University's SPHINX II recognizer and of obtaining correct prosody information in order to implement it in a system to aid in foreign language learning.