Measuring Phoneme-Level Pronunciation Deviations in Japanese Learners of English Using Self-Supervised Speech Representations

Research suggests a part of the reason for the limited English Proficiency, or bilingualism, in Japan, is tied to a societal 'fear' of mispronouncing certain words in English. Accurate pronunciation feedback is therefore essential for Japanese learners of English, but traditional Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) software typically provides general feedback, lacking the necessary regional nuance required for greater effectiveness. This paper provides insight into the phoneme-level deviations of Japanese speakers of English, compared to a baseline of American English speakers, conducted on the UME-ERJ corpus by the NII-SRC (Japan's National Institute of Informatics-Speech Resources Consortium) using a self-supervised speech representation (SSSR) model, which, to the best of our knowledge, represents the first attempt to quantify pronunciation deviations in Japanese-English using this state-of-the-art method. Supplementary Material File (final.pdf) - Download - 317.87 KB Information & Authors Information Version history Copyright This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Authors Metrics & Citations Metrics Article Usage 155views 67downloads Citations Download citation Atharv Kulkarni. Measuring Phoneme-Level Pronunciation Deviations in Japanese Learners of English Using Self-Supervised Speech Representations. Authorea. 08 January 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.176790736.69049861/v1 DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.176790736.69049861/v1 If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download. For more information or tips please see 'Downloading to a citation manager' in the Help menu.