Transparent Pronunciation Scoring Using Articulatorily Weighted Phoneme Edit Distance

For researching effects of gamification in foreign language learning for children in the “Say It Again, Kid!” project we developed a feedback paradigm that can drive gameplay in pronunciation learning games. We describe our scoring system based on the difference between a reference phone sequence and the output of a multilingual CTC phoneme recogniser. We present a white-box scoring model of mapped weighted Levenshtein edit distance between reference and error with error weights for articulatory differences computed from a training set of scored utterances. The system can produce a human-readable list of each detected mispronunciation’s contribution to the utterance score. We compare our scoring method to established black box methods.