Speech-enabled Card Games for Language Learners

This paper debuts a novel application of speech recog-nition to foreign language learning. We present a generic framework for developing user-customizable card games designed to aid learners in the difficult task of vocabulary acquisition. We also describe a prototype game built on this framework that, using a Mandarin speech recognizer, provides a student of Chinese with opportunities to speak vocabulary items in a meaning-ful context. The system dynamically loads only the nec-essary vocabulary for each game in an effort to main-tain robust recognition performance without limiting the lexical domain. To assess the Sentence Error Rate (SER) of our prototype, we asked college-age students from various universities in the United States and be-yond to participate in aWeb-based user study. The three central concepts of the game were recognized with a SER of 16.02%, illustrating the feasibility of deploying this system in a university curriculum via the Internet. Finally, to ensure that our recognizer is behaving ap-propriately with regard to learner speech, we perform a rigorous analysis of the recognition errors to determine their underlying causes