Pronunciation variations of Spanish-accented English spoken by young children

When learning to speak English, non-native speakers may pronounce some English phonemes differently from native speakers. These pronunciation variations can degrade an automatic speech recognition system’s performance on accented English. This paper is a first attempt to find common pronunciation variations in Spanishaccented English as spoken by young children. The analysis of pronunciation variation is performed using dynamic programming-based transcription alignment on 4500 words spoken by children 5-7 years old whose first language is Spanish. The findings are then compared with linguistic hypotheses.