SPRING: speech and pronunciation improvement through games, for Hispanic children
This addresses pronunciation barriers for Hispanic immigrant children, though it is incremental as it applies existing speech technologies in a new educational context.
The paper tackled the problem of English pronunciation difficulties among Hispanic immigrant children in the U.S. by developing a game-based system using speech technologies, resulting in statistically significant gains in pronunciation quality over a 3-month study.
Lack of proper English pronunciations is a major problem for immigrant population in developed countries like U.S. This poses various problems, including a barrier to entry into mainstream society. This paper presents a research study that explores the use of speech technologies merged with activity-based and arcade-based games to do pronunciation feedback for Hispanic children within the U.S. A 3-month long study with immigrant population in California was used to investigate and analyze the effectiveness of computer aided pronunciation feedback through games. In addition to quantitative findings that point to statistically significant gains in pronunciation quality, the paper also explores qualitative findings, interaction patterns and challenges faced by the researchers in dealing with this community. It also describes the issues involved in dealing with pronunciation as a competency.