Automatic evaluation of quantity contrast in non-native Norwegian speech
Ingunn Amdal, Magne Hallstein Johnsen, Eivind Versvik · 2009
Computer assisted language learning (CAPT) has been shown to be effective for learning non-natives pronunciation details of a new language.No automatic pronunciation evaluation system exists for non-native Norwegian.We present initial experiments on the Norwegian quantity contrast between short and long vowels.A database of native and non-native speakers was recorded for training and test respectively.We have used a set of acoustic-phonetic features and combined them in a classifier based on linear discriminant analysis (LDA).The resulting classification rate was 92.3% compared with a human rating.As expected, vowel duration was the most important feature, whereas vowel spectral content contributed insignificantly.The achieved classification rate is promising with respect to making a useful Norwegian CAPT for quantity.