A Study on Visual Support Way in English Pronunciation Training System and Consideration on Pronunciation Instructions

Abstract

In pronunciation training, we learn to properly control properly our articulator for correct pronunciation. Therefore, the pronunciation training system needs to build effective visual support for the trainee. In this report, we propose a pronunciation training system that constructs visual support based on formants, and examine its effectiveness. From the system verification experiments, we identify the problems caused by the fact that the trainee has not recognized the tongue shape. We focus on the protrusion of the lips and investigate the relationship between point of articulation and acoustic features. As a result, it was found that the vocal tract area function, which is an acoustic feature, has a stronger relationship with the point of articulation than the formant. Moreover, we believe that this result can cope with deviation of the point of articulation due to protrusion of the lips and can be utilized for pronunciation instructions.