A listening comprehension serious game for European Portuguese learning

European Portuguese (EP) L2 learners often state that their listening skills cannot cope with spontaneous speech. In fact, one well-known characteristic of EP that distinguishes it from Brazilian Portuguese in particular, is the strong use of vowel reduction and simplification of consonantal clusters, both within words and across word boundaries [1]. Vowel reduction can result in vowel devoicing, voicing assimilation, deletion and coalescence. Common contractions can be partial or full syllable truncation and vowel coalescence. For example, in ’campo pequeno’, the coalescence of the two plosives ’p’ would be a standard realization. Hence, in our effort to develop Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) tools to help EP learners, the practice of listening comprehension appeared to be a very important feature to explore. The growing interest in using serious games in the CALL community to motivate learners, led us to develop a game dedicated to the practice of listening comprehension. The game consists in identifying the words actually pronounced in real speech utterances. The learner is asked to listen to an utterance using only audio or along with a video clip, and then the sentence should be reconstructed by choosing words from lists containing the correct words and some distractors. In fact, our main objective is to provide learners with realistic speech for them to get used to the sounds and the pronunciation of EP. The game introduces two innovative aspects: the multimedia curriculum itself, comprised of broadcast news videos and the fully-automatic generation of the exercises, allowed by the use of our automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine to transcribe the videos and the filtering chain to select appropriate sentences.