Pronunciation Diagnosis —What to correct at first in YOUR case? —

Native-sounding vs. intelligible. This has been a controversial issue for a long time in lan-guage learning and many teachers claim that intelligible pronunciation should be the goal. What is the physical definition of intelligibility? The current work shows a very good candi-date answer to this question. The first author proposed a new paradigm of observing speech acoustics based upon structural phonology, where all the kinds of speech events are viewed as an entire structure and this structure was shown to be mathematically invariant with any static non-linguistic features such as age, gender, size, shape, microphone, room, line, and so on. This acoustic structure is purely linguistic and the phoneme-level structure is regarded as the pronunciation structure of individual students. This structure is matched with another linguis-tic structure, the lexical structure of the target language, and degree of compatibility between the two different levels of structures is calculated, which is defined as the intelligibility in this work. To increase the intelligibility, different instructions should be prepared for different stu-dents because no two students are the same. The phonological structure can be divided into some sub-structures. By evaluating which sub-structure causes the largest damage when com-municating in the target language with the student’s phonological structure, the instruction is automatically generated on what to correct at first in his/her case