Open AccessAutomatic identification of synthetically generated interlanguage transfer phenomena between brazilian portuguese (L1) and english (L2)
Author(s) -
Atos Apollo Silva Borges,
Washington Luis Pinho Rodrigues Filho,
Aratuza Rodrigues Silva Rocha,
Wilson Júnior de Araújo Carvalho,
Ronaldo Lima,
Fábio Rocha Barbosa
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of speech sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2236-9740
DOI - 10.20396/joss.v10i00.15863
Subject(s) - pronunciation , computer science , interlanguage , identification (biology) , centroid , portuguese , artificial intelligence , natural language processing , transfer of learning , software , process (computing) , brazilian portuguese , negative transfer , linguistics , first language , programming language , philosophy , botany , biology
Transfer phenomena between Portuguese (L1) and English (L2) produced by Brazilian learners are well documented in the literature. However, the identification and classification of these processes are made mainly through transcriptions, a slow and laborious process done by specialized linguists. The rapid identification of these phenomena would be of great value for software doing proficiency placement tests and could be used in language schools, distance education, computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) or by autodidacts and researchers. The present work analyzed possible techniques and tools that can be used in the automatic identification of some transfer processes. The data for the grapho-phonic-phonological transfer were synthetically generated in the Google Translate™ TTS system. Then we tested three classification algorithms to perform the identification: k-Nearest Neighbor, Centroid Minimum Distance, and Artificial Neural Networks. The results indicate that these techniques are of great value for Linguistics and for new software applications in language learning.