Design of an Interactive GUI for Pronunciation Evalua- tion and Training
Naoya Horiguchi · 2010
Although language learners often desire to improve their pronunciation of a foreign language, the software to help them do so is limited in scope. Most commercial software for pronunciation evaluation and training focuses on the acoustic signal in the evaluation and training of a learner. However, few systems, if any, give visual feedback of the learner’s articulators (lips, tongue, and jaw). In this paper, we describe the ongoing development of a GUI that is programmed in Objective-C for Mac OS X. Our software uses QTKit framework for video recording and playing, and some open source libraries for audio recording, audio playing, and pitch detection. The GUI incorporates and links together many kinds of phonetic data for the pronunciation learner - for example, realtime frontal video of the learner, recorded frontal and side videos of a native speaker’s face during pronunciation, an ultrasound movie of the tongue moving in the mouth, and MRI images of the native speaker’s tongue during the production of all the sounds in the training text.