Human Judgement

Among automatically-detected pronunciation errors, seven samples for /h/ in [yoNhoN], /k/ in [saNkai], /p/ in [saNpuN] are assured to be errors by all five human raters as shown with a dotted line in Table 3.4. For the remaining errors, their judgements were ambiguous. No mispronunciation was found in ichi+compounds, which is contrary to our expectations. It may be because most of non-native learners memorize well this first-beginning irregularity.

(1)

First, learners A and C unclearly pronounced /h/ in [yoNhoN]. A voiceless sound after /N/ is known to be hard to pronounce (see TYPE 7 in section 3.6.3).

(2)

Learners A, B and D pronounced /g/ for /k/ in [saNkai]. It is assumed that the homonym, 三階 (third floor) that can be read as [saNgai], affected their mispronunciation.

表 3.3: HMM scores for the phoneme after numerals

SYM	NATIVE	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
iqpoN	-27.47	-28.14	-26.86	-24.69	-27.91	-26.86	-28.78	-25.16	-27.55
nihoN	-26.37	-33.51	-28.89	-24.98	-26.50	-28.89	-26.98	-25.10	-25.94
saNboN	-26.48	-28.12	-26.84	-25.35	-27.81	-26.84	-25.83	-27.10	-24.46
yoNhoN	-26.55	-30.26	-27.30	-30.66	-25.55	-27.30	-25.75	-26.44	-24.60
gohoN	-26.20	-28.14	-27.76	-26.95	-26.46	-27.76	-24.28	-25.61	-25.03
iqkai	-27.02	-28.31	-28.74	-26.57	-27.82	-28.73	-27.78	-28.19	-27.88
nikai	-27.81	-33.35	-27.67	-27.18	-27.84	-26.62	-26.10	-25.46	-24.22
saNkai	-25.03	-31.36	-29.84	-28.56	-32.29	-28.19	-28.21	-26.79	-25.96
yoNkai	-25.34	-28.79	-31.68	-28.48	-26.40	-29.13	-26.45	-26.94	-25.41
gokai	-26.16	-27.57	-30.64	-26.26	-26.63	-27.89	-24.91	-25.50	-25.98
iqpuN	-25.77	-28.02	-25.02	-26.22	-26.97	-26.95	-26.13	-26.75	-24.79
nihuN	-27.96	-27.96	-26.21	-26.13	-26.45	-26.10	-26.53	-27.08	-25.02
saNpuN	-24.22	-27.81	-26.48	-27.21	-26.03	-29.52	-23.85	-30.30	-24.77
yoNhuN	-26.43	-27.35	-27.41	-27.49	-26.77	-27.37	-28.40	-27.56	-25.15
gohuN	-26.88	-24.54	-25.46	-26.60	-24.79	-27.60	-27.91	-26.34	-23.86

  
図 3.4: HMM scores for M-set

(3)

As for /p/ in [saNpuN], non-native learners E and G did /b/ as we expected that the mispronunciation [saNboN] [saNpoN] or [saNpuN] [saNbuN] would occur.