A Prosodic Module for Self-Learning Activities

We created an application specialized in prosodic tutoring, called the Prosodic Module(PM). The PM is composed of two different sets of Learning Activities, the first one dealing with prosodic problems at word syllabic level, the second one dealing with prosodic problems at phonological phrase and utterance level. The PM is able to detect significant deviations from a master's word/ phrase/ utterance and offers visual aids and a written diagnosis of the problem as well as indications on how to overcome and correct the error. This is achieved by means of a comparison between the two signals, the master and the student one; elements of comparison are constituted by the acoustic correlates of well-known prosodic elements such as intonational contour, sentence accent and word stress, duration at syllable, word and sentence level. We argue that the use of Automatic Speech Recognition as Teaching Aid should be targeted to narrowly focussed spoken exercises, for intermediate or higher level students, disallowing open-ended dialogues, in order to ensure consistency of evaluation. In addition, we support the conjoined use of ASR technology and prosodic tools to gauge Goodness of Pronunciation for linguistically consistent feedback.