Fluency and L1 phonology interference on L2 English analysis of Japanese AESOP corpus

Mariko Kondo*, Hajime Tsubaki

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Fifty Japanese speakers' read speech data of 'the North Wind and the Sun' from the Japanese AESOP corpus was analyzed by automatic alignment using the HTK tool with a modified TIMIT dictionary. The results showed typical phonetic and phonological problems of English pronunciation by Japanese speakers which have been often discussed in EFL. The Japanese subjects' English fluency was evaluated by 8 English teachers, 3 native English and 5 Japanese speaking teachers. Typical EFL pronunciation problems were found more among lower level speakers and become less problematic for fluent speakers. However, some problems were found persistently, even among fluent speakers. The results also suggest that the automatic alignment we have adopted for our corpus analysis provide acceptable data, and that it should be possible to adopt it to analyze L2 English with other L1 Asian languages.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments, Oriental COCOSDA 2012
Pages123-128
Number of pages6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Event2012 15th International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments, Oriental COCOSDA 2012 - Macau, China
Duration: 2012 Dec 92012 Dec 12

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments, Oriental COCOSDA 2012

Conference

Conference2012 15th International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments, Oriental COCOSDA 2012
Country/TerritoryChina
CityMacau
Period12/12/912/12/12

Keywords

  • AESOP
  • L1 Japanese
  • L2 English
  • automatic alignment
  • language fluency

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Speech and Hearing

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