Using the HTK speech recogniser to anlayse prosody in a corpus of German spoken learner's English
T. Oba, Eric Atwell · White Rose Research Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) · 2003
Intonation is important in human communication to help the listener to understand the meaning and attitude of the speaker (Brown, 1977; O’Connor, 1970). Language students and teachers see intonation as a part of the structure of the language (Tench, 1996). However, acquisition of proper intonation is difficult for nonnative speakers and requires repeated practice (O’Connor, 1970). For example, the Interactive Spoken Language Education (ISLE) project found that intonation was the biggest problem for German learners of English, but the project did not tackle intonation (Atwell et al, 1999).