Are Scoring Feedback of CAPT Systems Helpful for Pronunciation Correction? –An Exception of Mandarin Nasal Finals

Abstract

The scoring feedback of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems facilitate learner’s instant awareness of their problems, easily lead to more practices. But whether it is enough to instruct the learners to understand how to correct their errors is still unknown. To see in depth, the impacts from CAPT technology on language learning, and to investigate learner’s correction strategy after receiving error warnings, this paper studies long term learning data of Chinese utterances by a number of CSL (Chinese as a Second Language) learners, with special efforts paid to the utterances of nasal Finals. The data resulted from a 3-week use of a CAPT APP, called “SAIT汉语” for Chinese learning, by 10 learners with different mother tongues. Major findings include: 1) Improvements were seen with almost all kinds of phonemes, except nasal Finals; 2) Data analyses showed that the learners had tried to lengthen the nasal codas after they received error warnings, while Chinese native data shows a significant nasalization period before a short coda. These results suggest that the scoring feedback can be beneficial to pronunciation training in most cases, except for some special ones. For the sounds such as Chinese nasal Finals, more appropriate feedback method is desired.