Exploratory use of automatic prosodic labels for the evaluation of Japanese speakers of L2 Spanish

Abstract

An automatic labeling system using Sp ToBI annotation conventions has been applied both to a non-native corpus of Japanese speakers using Spanish and to a reference corpus of Spanish speakers. A set of metrics based on conditional entropy is computed by using the output of an automatic labeler which happens to be highly correlated with the rates assigned by a team of subject evaluators. An analysis of the relative frequencies in the use of each of the Sp ToBI symbols permits to identify the recurrent mistakes in the productions of non-native speakers. It is discussed with the results that the majority of the observed prosodic deficits can be explained by the prosodic transference between the Japanese and Spanish systems as it had been previouly reported in the state of art.