Section: Application Domains

Computer Assisted Learning

Although speaking seems quite natural, learning foreign languages, or learning the mother tongue for people with language deficiencies, represents critical cognitive stages. Hence, many scientific activities have been devoted to these issues either from a production or a perception point of view. The general guiding principle with respect to computer assisted mother or foreign language learning is to combine modalities or to augment speech to make learning easier. Based upon a comparison of the learner’s production to a reference, automatic diagnoses of the learner’s production can be considered, as well as perceptual feedback relying on an automatic transformation of the learner’s voice. The diagnosis step strongly relies on the studies on categorization of sounds and prosody in the mother tongue and in the second language. Furthermore, reliable diagnosis on each individual utterance is still a challenge, and elaboration of advanced automatic feedback requires a temporally accurate segmentation of speech utterances into phones and this explains why accurate segmentation of native and non-native speech is an important topic in the field of acoustic speech modeling.