Analysis of L2 English Speech Corpus by Automatic Phoneme Alignment

This study tested the application of adapted HTK for automatic alignment of speech corpus of Asian speakers’ English. The HTK tool with TIMIT has problems in aligning non-native speakers’ English. New sets of phoneme sequences for each word were listed to test if an adapted alignment module could accurately analyze pronunciation of Japanese speakers’ English. The new sets of phoneme sequences produced better alignment of Japanese accented English and showed that the L2 incorporated new alignment module could perform more accurate automatic alignment of L2 English data. The same methods should be able to be applied to other language data.