Second Language Studies: Acquisition, Learning, Education and Technology Tokyo, Japan September 22-24, 2010

Toward a Chanting Robot for Interactively Teaching English to Children

Ryo Nagata (1), Tomoya Mizumoto (2), Kotaro Funakoshi (3), Mikio Nakano (3)

(1) Faculty of Intelligence and Informatics, Konan University, Japan
(2) Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
(3) Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd., Japan

To acquire a second language, one must develop an ear and tongue for the correct stress and intonation patterns of that language. In English education, there is a rhythmic teaching method called Jazz Chants. This paper proposes a new application for second language education which combines Jazz Chants with a companion robot, and reports our technical investigations toward realizing such a robot. Investigated were two key technologies: predicting stresses in Jazz Chants and synthesizing chant speech. Experiments show promising results and reveal requirements for further improvement.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Nagata, Ryo / Mizumoto, Tomoya / Funakoshi, Kotaro / Nakano, Mikio (2010): "Toward a chanting robot for interactively teaching English to children", In L2WS-2010, paper P2-13.