Developing computerized transcription exercises for American English

Acquiring the skill of phonetic transcription from orthographic text is a widespread technique included in all undergraduate curricula for phonetics, linguistics and speech science. It is an ability which is also frequently expected in students of modern languages and English. Any instructor who has been faced with a pile of thirty and more transcriptions to mark knows what a laborious task this is, requiring a lot of close examination of fine detail. To be able to lighten the load by computerizing some of the detail of error-correcting is therefore seen as desirable from several points of view.