Collaborative Research: Translating Prosody in an English/Chinese Language Tutoring System

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Prosody is an integral part of human communication, but one thatsecond language (L2) learners rarely learn. Topic shifts, contrastivefocus, and even simple question/statement distinctions, cannot berecognized or produced in many languages without an understanding oftheir prosody. However, 'translating' between the prosody of onelanguage and that of another is a little-studied phenomenon. Thisresearch addresses the 'prosody translation' problem for MandarinChinese and English L2 learners by identifying correspondences betweenprosodic phenomena in each language that convey similar meanings. Thework is based on comparisons of L1 and L2 prosodic phenomena and themeanings they convey. Computational models of prosodic variationsuitable for representing these phenomena in each language areconstructed from data collected in the laboratory, with results testedon L1 and L2 subjects. The models are tested in an interactivetutoring system which takes an adaptive, self-paced approach toprosody tutoring. This system modifies training and testing examplesautomatically by imcremental enhancement of distinctive prosodicfeatures in response to student performance. The success of thesystem is evaluated via longitudinal studies of L2 students of bothlanguages to see whether the new techniques improve students' abilityto recognize and produce L2 prosodic variation. By providing a methodand computational support for prosody tutoring, this work will notonly enable students to attain more native-like fluency but it willprovide a model for training students in other pragmatic languagephenomena --- beyond learning the words and the syntax of a newlanguage.