SBIR/Phase I: Native Accent Pitch

这个小企业创新研究第一阶段项目将为非母语人士开发自动音高错误检测（精确定位），并确定使用这种检测方法的软件是否有助于人们提高发音。全球每年有超过5000万人花费超过500亿美元学习英语。卡内基演讲的NativeAccent教授英语的发音和节奏，但不教授音高，因为过去对音高的检测并不可靠。然而，新的检测方法将使软件能够显示非母语人士和母语人士的话语差异。正确的音高可以让听者在多个句子中都能听懂，因为听者可以从一个内容丰富的词转到下一个。最近的认知科学发现已经产生了训练非母语人士对比电话声音的成功技术。这个项目将运用这些技巧来进行音高对比，特别是普通话中的音调对比。音调训练将音高问题分解为一种基本类型的变化，然后建立更大、更复杂的音高轮廓，并将这些技术应用于英语。受训者将使用一个由NativeAccent引导的反馈游戏和智能辅导技术。第一阶段的成功与否将取决于人们是否能被教导用NativeAccent Pitch比传统方法更有效地发出音调。如果这项技术的主要长期目标应用能够使有效的英语韵律教学取得成功，该公司将在语言教学方面取得最先进的进展，并将为许多人提供重要的能力，特别是在商业环境中，对他们来说，说多种语言的能力变得越来越重要。该系统可以用于不同的教育环境，并可以进一步扩展到其他语言。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 project will develop automatic pitch error detection (pinpointing) for non-native speakers and determine whether software using this detection method helps people improve their pronunciation. Over 50 million people worldwide spend over $50 billion per year learning to speak English. Carnegie Speech's NativeAccent teaches English sounds and rhythm, but not pitch since its detection was unreliable in the past. New detection methods, however, will enable the software to show differences between non-native and native speakers' utterances. Correct pitch makes speech understandable over more than one sentence as the listener is guided from one high-content word to the next. Recent cognitive science findings have produced successful techniques for training non-native speakers to contrast phone sounds. This project will adapt those techniques to pitch contrast, specifically, tones in Mandarin. Tonal training breaks the pitch problem down into one basic type variation, later building up to larger, more complex pitch contours and applying the techniques to English. Trainees will use a game with feedback piloted by NativeAccent pinpointing and intelligent tutoring techniques. Success in Phase 1 will be measured by whether people can be taught to produce tones more effectively with NativeAccent Pitch than with classical methods. If the major long term target application of this technology to enable effective English prosody instruction succeeds, the firm will have advanced the state-of-the-art in language teaching and will have provided an important capability to a number of people especially in business contexts for whom the ability to speak more than one language is becoming increasingly important The system could be used across diverse educational settings and could be further extended to other languages.