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

日本文部科学省宣布，将于2011年将英语教育引入小学。这意味着2011年学英语的日本学生的数量将大幅增加，但事实是，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年轻学生的英语学习和发音评估。目前的语音技术很难充分处理儿童的声音。例如，如果使用成人语音样本构建评估系统，则由于成人和儿童的声音之间存在较大的声学差异，该系统无法充分处理儿童的声音。如果有大量的儿童语音样本，一个好的系统是可能的，但与幼儿的录音是一项非常繁重的任务，说话人自适应技术可以用于广告…更适合成人的系统变成特定幼儿(学生)的系统。但在这种情况下，糟糕的发音可能会被判断为良好，因为对特定的年轻学生过度适应。为了彻底解决这些问题，我们提出了一种新的语音技术，通过去除说话人的年龄和性别的声学特征来表示话语。在该方法中，只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，因为该距离与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语音的声学变换，然后，所提出的表示是说话人不变的。使用这种新的结构表征，建立了一个评估任何年龄段学生产生的英语元音的系统。该系统具有四大功能。1)记录或记录个别学生因训练而引起的元音系统变化。2)纯粹根据发音差异对学习者进行分类，而不考虑年龄和性别；3)生成首先要纠正哪些元音的指令；以及4)非常鼓舞人心的发音培训用户界面。在为期三年的时间里，在高中、初中和小学等多个地点对原型系统进行了测试和评估。然后，500多名年龄从3岁到70岁的学生参加了我们的语音测试。分析结果表明，所提出的方法和系统具有很高的有效性。此外，利用这些数据，我们根据学生的发音对500多名学生进行了分类，不分年龄和性别，并定义了5个典型的英语日语发音。较少

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