Interpreting Visual Feedback on English Suprasegmentals in Computer Assisted Pronunciation Instruction

Abstract

Although electronic visual feedback for teaching suprasegmentals has been discussed in the literature in the last few years, insufficient information has been published on how to interpret visual feedback graphs, a necessary skill for selecting appropriate phonetic material to be used with visual feedback and for explaining the visual display to students. The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the problems in interpreting visual feedback displays of suprasegmentals and to discuss some strategies for using this type of feedback on suprasegmentals more effectively. The problems discussed are interpreting the pitch display, identifying syllables, determining syllable, boundaries and syllable duration, and interpreting pitch and intensity patterns when the parameters of duration, pitch, and display space are varied. An understanding of such problems should help the teacher to become more effective in selecting utterances to be used with visual feedback so that students will be able to identify suprasegmental patterns and learn them with the greatest ease possible.