Linguistic Support of a CAPT System for Teaching English Pronunciation to Mexican Spanish Speakers

This paper presents an error prevention approach in the development of a Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training System (CAPT System) for teaching American English pronunciation to adult Mexican Spanish speakers developed for the case of vowels. Prior knowledge of the learner’s typical articulatory and auditory perception errors enhances the effectiveness of training. It enables to organize the teaching material in a way that foresees possible errors as well as to select appropriate exercises instead of using general pronunciation drills. Our first contribution is an extended comparative analysis of American English and Mexican Spanish vowels at the level of both phonemes and allophones. To the best of our knowledge, such analysis was not done in previous work. Another contribution of this work is a two-fold application of our analysis results: on the one hand, we use the results in designing error patterns to be employed in the error detection module of the CAPT system, and on the other hand, we employ the results as a basis for creating the linguistic content of the error prevention oriented tutor module of the same system. We illustrate this approach with examples.