Dear list
Is there any software developed for acoustic bio-feedback teaching of
pronunciation?
Many years ago, when I was a student of phonetics at the Univ of Copenhagen,
long before modern widespread computing I dabbled a bit in this, using the
real-time analyzers I could get hold of at that time, but then I left the
field again.
The great thing about the bio-feedback aaproach is, of course, that you can
bypass a lot of explaning, thus making the methodology useful for beginners
you can barely communicate with and for teachers who know nothing - or worse
- wrong things about the sounds. You just show the student what the display
should look like and leave her with the mike on her own to try out what
gives the right picture on the screen. There are of course a lot of problems
in this, since there is hardly a one-to-one relationship between a given
phonetic category and an acoustic display.
To give an example, intensity display was really helpful in teaching the
Danish b/v distinction to Spanish speakers.
OTOH the display of frequency variation seemed to be of no use to teach
intonation patterns, since there was to much information in the display, and
I couldn't at taht time figure out how to reduce the amount of information
to the prototypical essentials.
In the context of teaching Danish to adult immigrants, and with computers
everywhere, I would like to take this idea up again, though. Does anybody
have any experience with this or related approaches?
E.g. formant-display to teach vowel distinctions? Or VOT to teach
aspiration? Etc
Any feedback and links would be greatly appreciated.
Ole Stig Andersen
Faelledvej 17 B, st th
DK-2200 Copenhagen N, Denmark
(+45) 2294 2045
http://www.olestig.dk/sprog
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