The Complementary Role of Para-linguistic cues for Robust Pronunciation Assessment

Research on pronunciation assessment systems focuses on utilizing phonetic and phonological aspects of non-native (L2) speech, often neglecting the rich layer of information hidden within the para-linguistic cues. In this study, we proposed a novel pronunciation assessment framework, IntraVerbalPA. The framework innovatively incorporates both fine-grained frame- and abstract utterance-level para-linguistic cues, alongside the raw speech and phoneme representations. Additionally, we introduce the “Goodness of phonemic-duration” metric to effectively model phoneme duration distribution within the framework. Our results validate the effectiveness of the proposed IntraVerbalPA framework and its individual components, yielding performance that matches or outperforms existing research works.