NativeAccent Kids: An English Pronunciation Trainer for Non-Native Children -- Extending Teacher Time and Helping Non-Native Children Catch Up in School

We will create Carnegie Speech's NativeAccent Kids beta system that can detect and pinpoint pronunciation errors in children's speech and offer specific correction help. This is important in elementary schools where many of the children enrolled are non-native speakers of Engligh. Although they do get ESL training, the time devoted to actually speaking is short. By having the children practice pronunciation and thus extending teacher tiem, NativeAccent Kids will help them catch up with school work much more quickly. While speech recognition works well for constrained tasks for adults, few have used the recognizer on children's speech. We have successfully adapted the adult NativeAccent (tm) to children's speech and now need to create an acceptable beta system. We will conduct tests of the resulting system, comparing user resultsto results of similar children who did not use this systme but had another English learning task to perform.