SCoPE, syllable core and periphery evaluation: Automatic syllabification and foreign accent identification

In this paper we apply a study of the structure of the English language towards an automatic syllabification algorithm and consequently an automatic foreign accent identification system. Any word consists of syllables which can in turn be divided into its constituents. Elements within the syllable structure are defined according to both their position within the syllable and the position of the syllable within the word structure. Elements of syllable structure that only occur at morpheme boundaries or that extend for the duration of morphemes are identified as peripheral elements; those that can occur anywhere with regard to word morphology are identified as core elements. All languages potentially make a distinction between core and peripheral elements of their syllable structure, however the specific forms these structures take will vary from language to language. In addition to problems posed by differences in phoneme inventories (a detailed analysis of comparative phoneme inventories across the languages treated here is outside the scope of this paper), we expect speakers with the greatest syllable structural differences between native and foreign language to have greatest difficulty with pronunciation in the foreign language. In this paper, we will analyze two accents of Australian English: Arabic whose core/periphery structure is similar to English and Vietnamese, whose structure is maximally different to English. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.