Abstract—Chinese retroflex aspirates are generally difficult
for Japanese students learning Chinese pronunciation. In
particular, discriminating between utterances of aspirated
dental and retroflex affricates is the most difficult for
Japanese-speakers to learn. For the students' self-learning, the
automatic judgment system was developed using a computer, so
as to check the pronunciations by themselves. We extracted the
features of correctly pronounced aspirated dental affricates
ca[ʦ‘a], ci[ʦ‘i], ce[ʦ‘ɤ], and cu[ʦ‘u] and aspirated retroflex
affricates cha[tʂ‘a], chi[tʂ‘i], che[tʂ‘ɤ], and chu[tʂ‘u] by
observing the spectrum evolution of breathing power during
both voice onset time and voiced period of sounds uttered by 40
Chinese native speakers. We developed a 35-channel
computerized filter bank to analyze the evolution of the
breathing power spectrum by using MATLAB and then
automatically evaluated the utterances of the 50 Japanese
students. At the same time, we asked to native Chinese speakers
to evaluate the same students’ utterances for the reference. Our
system rejected several samples that passed the screening by the
native speakers. The success rates of the system were higher
than 91% and 95% for aspirated retroflex and dental affricates,
respectively.
Index Terms—Automatic pronunciation discrimination,
Chinese aspirated retroflex and dental affricates, e-learning.
Akemi Hoshino is with Toyama National College of Technology, 1-2
Ebie, Neriya, ImizuCity, Toyama, 933-0293 Japan (e-mail: hoshino@
nc-toyama.ac.jp).
Akio Yasuda is with Tokyo University of Marine Science and
Technology, 2-1-3 Etchujima, Koto-ku, Tokyo, 135-8533 Japan (e-mail:
yasuda@kaiyodai.ac.jp).
Cite: Akemi Hoshino and Akio Yasuda, "Automatic Judgment System for Chinese Retroflex and Dental Affricates Pronounced by Japanese Students," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 167-171, 2014.