The STAR system: an interactive pronunciation tutor for young children

Between 1990 and 1998, the Speech Research Unit at the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), and Hereford and Worcester County Council Education Department, a U.K. local education authority, conducted research into the use of speech recognition technology in an interactive computer-based pronunciation tutor for 5-7 year-old primary school children. The goal of the project was to develop a robust, autonomous system that would enable a child to practice the pronunciation of a given set of words by speaking them to a computer, which provided immediate feedback on whether the pronunciation was acceptable. This paper describes the development of the underlying speech recognition technology, the prototype real-time system which was developed, and the results of pilot trials of the system in a U.K. primary school. (C) 2000 Academic Press.