2019 年 19 巻 p. 15-26
We propose a Japanese utterance education support system for non non-native speakers using fundamental frequencies and original phonetic segments. In the system, after automatically extracting syllables using phonetic segment labels, accent and intonation are evaluated by comparing the estimated F0 of each syllable to the criteria which were obtained from the Japanese speech database. The system also provides suggestions for improvement for the learners. An experiment was conducted to evaluate accent kernels of long vowels and syllabic nasals, vowel devoicing, intonation in questions, and tonal phrases uttered by the learners. Of the 120 data items in the experiment, 31 were erroneous utterances. Of such 31 erroneous items, however, improvement was observed among 29 items with the help of the system. Since the system quantitatively evaluates utterances of Japanese learners, it was shown that it is effective for teachers and learners.