Articulatory Comparison of L1 and L2 Speech for Mispronunciation Diagnosis

This paper compares the difference in articulation patterns between native (L1) and non-native (L2) Mandarin speakers of English, for the purpose of providing an understanding of mispronunciation behaviors of L2 learners. Consensus transcriptions from the Electromagnetic Articulography Mandarin Accented English (EMA-MAE) corpus are used to identify commonly occurring substitution errors for consonants and vowels. Phoneme level alignments of the utterances produced by speech recognition models are used to extract articulatory feature vectors representing correct and substituted sounds from L1 and L2 speaker groups respectively. The articulatory features that are significantly different between the two groups are identified along with the direction of error for the L2 speaker group. Experimental results provide information about which types of substitutions are most common and which specific articulators are the most significant contributors to those errors.