Automatic Speech Recognition of Non-Native Child Speech for Language
  Learning Applications
Simone Wills Yu Bai Cristian Tejedor-Garcia Catia Cucchiarini Helmer Strik
Voicebots have provided a new avenue for supporting the development of
language skills, particularly within the context of second language learning.
Voicebots, though, have largely been geared towards native adult speakers. We
sought to assess the performance of two state-of-the-art ASR systems,
Wav2Vec2.0 and Whisper AI, with a view to developing a voicebot that can
support children acquiring a foreign language. We evaluated their performance
on read and extemporaneous speech of native and non-native Dutch children. We
also investigated the utility of using ASR technology to provide insight into
the children's pronunciation and fluency. The results show that recent,
pre-trained ASR transformer-based models achieve acceptable performance from
which detailed feedback on phoneme pronunciation quality can be extracted,
despite the challenging nature of child and non-native speech.