SLIM Prosodic Module for Learning Activities in a Foreign Language

The Prosodic Module of SLIM has been created in order to solve problems related to segmental and suprasegmental features of spoken English in a courseware for computer- assisted foreign language learning called SLIM - an acronym for Multimedia Interactive Linguistic Software, developed at the University of Venice. It is composed of two different sets of Learning Activities, the first one dealing with phonetic and prosodic problems at word segmental level, the second one dealing with prosodic problems at utterance suprasegmental level. The main goal of Prosodic Activities is to ensure feed-back to the student intending to improve his/her pronunciation in a foreign language. The programme works by comparing two signals, the master and the student ones, where the master has been previously edited by a human tutor inserting orthographic syllabic information at segmentation marks automatically computed by the underlying acoustic segmenter called Prosodics(see 1). When a student, after listening and evaluating the master signal tries to mimic the original utterance or word the system assigns a score and, if needed spots a mistake and indicates what it consists of. The elements of comparison are constituted by the acoustic correlates of prosodic features such as intonational contour, sentence accent and word stress, rhythm and duration at word and sentence level.