Method and system for assessing pronunciation difficulties of non-native speakers by entropy calculation

US7778834B2 · kind B2 · utility

Assignee

• Educational Testing Service · US

Inventors

• Derrick Higgins · Highland Park, US
• Klaus Zechner · Princeton, US
• Yoko Futagi · Lawrenceville, US
• Rene Lawless · Pennington, US

Key dates

• Filing date: Aug 11, 2008
• Grant date: Aug 17, 2010
• Expiry date: Aug 11, 2028

Classification

• Technology area (CPC G): Physics
• CPC primary: G10L15/19
• WIPO field: Control
• WIPO sector: Instruments

Abstract

The present disclosure presents a useful metric for assessing the relative difficulty which non-native speakers face in pronouncing a given utterance and a method and systems for using such a metric in the evaluation and assessment of the utterances of non-native speakers. In an embodiment, the metric may be based on both known sources of difficulty for language learners and a corpus-based measure of cross-language sound differences. The method may be applied to speakers who primarily speak a first language speaking utterances in any non-native second language.