Method and System for Assessing Pronunciation Difficulties of Non-Native Speakers
- Author(s):
- Higgins, Derrick; Zechner, Klaus; Futagi, Yoko; Lawless, Rene
- Patent Issued:
- Jul 02, 2013
- Patent Number:
- 8,478,597
- Source:
- ETS Patent
- Document Type:
- Patent
- Family ID:
- 36678110
- Subject/Key Words:
- Patent, Active Patent, Speech Recognition, Entropy, Pronunciation, Non-Native Speakers, Difficulty Level
Abstract
The present disclosure presents a useful metric for assessing the relative difficulty which non-native speakers face in pronouncing a given utterance and a method and systems for using such a metric in the evaluation and assessment of the utterances of non-native speakers. In an embodiment, the metric may be based on both known sources of difficulty for language learners and a corpus-based measure of cross-language sound differences. The method may be applied to speakers who primarily speak a first language speaking utterances in any non-native second language.