Fluency and L1 phonology interference on L2 English analysis OF Japanese AESOP corpus

Fifty Japanese speakers´ read speech data of “the North Wind and the Sun” from the Japanese AESOP corpus was analyzed by automatic alignment using the HTK tool with a modified TIMIT dictionary. The results showed typical phonetic and phonological problems of English pronunciation by Japanese speakers which have been often discussed in EFL. The Japanese subjects´ English fluency was evaluated by 8 English teachers, 3 native English and 5 Japanese speaking teachers. Typical EFL pronunciation problems were found more among lower level speakers and become less problematic for fluent speakers. However, some problems were found persistently, even among fluent speakers. The results also suggest that the automatic alignment we have adopted for our corpus analysis provide acceptable data, and that it should be possible to adopt it to analyze L2 English with other L1 Asian languages.