On the use of an articulatory talking head for second language pronunciation training: the case of Chinese learners of French
Résumé
This study investigates the usefulness of a French Articulatory Talking Head (ATH) to train Mandarin Chinese speakers to produce French vowels that do not exist in their phonetic repertoire. Two groups of Mandarin Chinese speakers were trained using either auditory or audiovisual stimuli displayed with the ATH, based on a speech shadowing task of immediate repetition of vowels and VCV sequences. We found that the F1 and F2 formants of vowels improved for both groups and that the audiovisual group (AVG) improved more than the auditory group (AG), which tends to validate the interest of the vision of articulators for the pronunciation training.