ACOUSTIC CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS AS A LINGUISTIC TOOL FOR CAPT-SYSTEMS (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF RUSSIAN AND GERMAN VOWELS)
Research shows that one of the key features that can improve the eﬀ ectiveness of CAPT-systems is error localization at the level of phonemes. Linguistic information about the user’s native language can facilitate this task. Provisions of contrastive analysis state that by comparing the phonetic systems of L1 and L2 we can predict interferential pronunciation errors most typical for L1 speakers in their L2 speech. Contrastive analysis is usually based on articulation and/or phonetic features of phonemes. In this paper, we discuss the method of acoustic contrast analysis on the material of Russian and German vowel subsystems. The analysis is based on F1 and F2 frequencies. As a result, we predicted three types of errors that native Russian speakers are most likely to make in vowels in their German speech: 1) lack of opposition between short and long vowels; 2) replacement of German monophthongs [u], [o] by acoustically close Russian vowels; 3) pronunciation errors on vowels [î] - [yð] and [œ] - [øð]. So as to conﬁ rm empirically the occurrence of these predicted errors, we analyzed German speech of native Russian speakers. Its acoustic analysis showed that all three types of pronunciation errors are regularly made by Russian speakers. The analysis showed that type 3 errors are perceived as having the strongest eﬀ ect on speech accent. The obtained data can be used in CAPT-systems to improve error localization at the level of phonemes and the user feedback module.