Analysis of phone confusion matrices in a manually annotated French-German learner corpus

Denis Jouvet (1) , Anne Bonneau (1) , Jürgen Trouvain (2) , Frank Zimmerer (2) , Yves Laprie (1) , Bernd Möbius (2)

1 MULTISPEECH - Speech Modeling for Facilitating Oral-Based Communication
2 Allgemeine Linguistik - Allgemeine Linguistik Computational Linguistics and phonetics

This paper presents an analysis of the non-native and native pronunciations observed in a phonetically annotated bilingual French-German corpus. After a forced-choice automatic annotation a large part of the corpus was checked and corrected manually on the phone level which allows a detailed comparison of the realized sounds with the expected sounds. The analysis is reported in terms of phone confusion matrices for selected error-prone classes of sounds. It revealed that German learners of French have most problems with obstruents in word-final position whereas French learners of German show complex interferences with the vowel contrasts for length and quality. Finally, the correct pronunciation rate of the sounds, for several phonetic classes, is analyzed with respect to the learner's level, and compared to native pronunciations. One outcome is that different sound classes show different correct rates over the proficiency levels. For the German data the frequently occurring syllabic [=n] is a prime indicator of the proficiency level.

Mots clés: Language learning; speech corpus; pronunciation variants; non-native speech

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Denis Jouvet, Anne Bonneau, Jürgen Trouvain, Frank Zimmerer, Yves Laprie, et al.. Analysis of phone confusion matrices in a manually annotated French-German learner corpus. Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education, Sep 2015, Leipzig, Germany. ⟨hal-01184186⟩