1.3 Thesis Outline

The first chapter of this thesis gives a brief description of the information to be covered in each of the subsequent chapters.

• Chapter 2 provides the theoretical background of our approach, i.e., articulatory phonetics and acoustic phonetics, and a summary of adopted speech recognition methods, and finally the overview and characteristics of the CAPL system.

The remainder of the thesis fully describes our own research: an automatic pronunciation assessments system, an effective self-corrective feedback system, and a speech rhythm CAPL system:

• Chapter 3 presents our research with the automatic pronunciation assessment method, and verifies our method by comparing with human ratings.
• Chapter 4 presents our research with the self-corrective feedback methods, and demonstrates their effectiveness by introducing test cases that showed improvement through CAPL feedback.
• Chapter 5 presents our research with speech rhythm training, and shows an efficient training method using rhythm pattern templates.
• The final chapter, Chapter 6, discusses the feasibility of our CAPL system and the system evaluation, and future works.