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Support of Foreign Language Pronunciation Training of Primary School Students Based on Comprehensive Description of the Pronunciation

基于语音综合描述的小学生外语发音训练支持

基本信息

批准号：
17300261
负责人：
MINEMATSU Nobuaki
金额：
$ 10.55万
依托单位：
The University of Tokyo
依托单位国家：
日本
项目类别：
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
财政年份：
2005
资助国家：
日本
起止时间：
2005 至 2007
项目状态：
已结题

项目摘要

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan announced that English education will be introduced into primary schools in 2011. This means that the number of Japanese students of English will be drastically increased in 2011 but it is a fact that the number of English teachers is not sufficient at all for those students. In this study, to solve this problem a new technique was built for supporting young students' learning English and assessing their pronunciation. Children's voices are very difficult to process adequately with the current speech technology. For example, if an assessment system is built with adult speech samples, the system cannot deal with children's voices adequately due to a large acoustic difference between adults' voices and children's voices. If a large number of samples of children voices are available, a good system is possible but the recording with young children is a very heavy task Speaker adaptation technology can be used to ad … More apt a system for adults into a system for a specific young child (student). But in this case, bad pronunciation may be judged as good because of over-adaptation to the specific young student. To solve these problems completely, we proposed a new speech technique of representing an utterance through removing the acoustic features showing the age and gender of the speaker. In the proposed method, only the timbre contrasts were extracted from speech events, where a contrast was measured as Bhattacharyya distance because the distance is completely invariant with any kind of linear or non-linear transformation. Speaker differences can be described as acoustic transformation of voices and then, the proposed representation is speaker-invariant. Using this new structural representation, a system of assessing English vowels produced by students of any age was built. The system has four functions. 1) recording or logging vowel system changes of individual students, caused by training. 2) classification of learners purely based on pronunciation variation, irrespective of age and gender, 3) generation of instructions on which vowels to correct at first, and 4) very motivating user-interface for pronunciation training. During a three-year period, a proto-type system was tested and evaluated in many locations, such as high schools, junior high schools and primary schools. Then, over 500 students aging from 3 to 70 joined our pronunciation test.The analysis results showed the very high validity of the proposed method and system. Further, using the data, we classified over-500 students based on their pronunciations, irrespective of age and gender, and we defined 5 typical Japanese pronunciations of English. Less

日本文部科学省宣布，将于2011年在小学引入英语教育。这意味着2011年日本的英语学生人数将大幅增加，但事实上，英语教师的数量根本不足以满足这些学生的需求。为了解决这一问题，本研究建立了一种新的技术来支持青少年学生学习英语和评估他们的发音。儿童的声音很难用目前的语音技术充分处理。例如，如果用成人语音样本构建评估系统，则由于成人的声音和儿童的声音之间的大的声学差异，该系统不能充分地处理儿童的声音。如果有大量的儿童声音样本，一个好的系统是可能的，但记录与幼儿是一个非常繁重的任务，扬声器适应技术可以用来广告。 ...更多信息将一个针对成人的系统调整为针对特定幼儿（学生）的系统。但在这种情况下，不好的发音可能会被判断为好，因为过度适应特定的年轻学生。为了彻底解决这些问题，我们提出了一种新的语音技术，表示一个发言，通过删除声学特征显示的年龄和性别的发言人。在所提出的方法中，仅从语音事件中提取音色对比度，其中对比度被测量为Bhattacharyya距离，因为该距离对于任何类型的线性或非线性变换都是完全不变的。说话人差异可以被描述为声音的声学变换，然后，所提出的表示是说话人不变的。利用这种新的结构表征，建立了一个评估任何年龄段学生英语元音的系统。该系统有四个功能。1)记录或记录个别学生的元音系统的变化，由培训引起的。2)学习者的分类完全基于发音的变化，不考虑年龄和性别，3）生成的指令，元音纠正首先，和4）非常激励用户界面的发音训练。在三年的时间里，在许多地方，如高中、初中和小学，对原型系统进行了测试和评估。对500多名年龄从3岁到70岁的学生进行了语音测试，测试结果表明了该方法和系统的有效性。此外，使用这些数据，我们根据他们的发音对500多名学生进行了分类，不分年龄和性别，我们定义了5种典型的日语英语发音。少