A Native-Reference Phone-Class Geometry for Second-Language Pronunciation Analysis

Tina Raissi, Nhan Phan, Chenxiao Wang, Mikko Kurimo

Automatic speaking assessment systems can provide holistic proficiency scores, but often lack interpretable measures that characterize pronunciation quality. We propose a native-reference phone-class geometry for measuring second language (L2) pronunciation deviation without requiring pronunciation labels, read-aloud prompts, or matched recordings of the same text from native and L2 speakers. Given a native speech corpus, we average frame-level self-supervised representations for each context-dependent phone-class and use singular value decomposition (SVD) to derive a compact native-reference coordinate system. For each L2 utterance, we compute the corresponding averages and project them into the native-reference space. We then demonstrate that the distances between L2 and native-reference coordinates for matched phone-classes show consistent negative correlations with holistic speaking proficiency on the Dev subset of the Speak and Improve Corpus 2025 (Spearman's $ρ\!=\!-0.53$) and with pronunciation quality on the learner subset of the English Read by Japanese Students dataset ($ρ\!=\!-0.34$). These findings suggest that the proposed geometry captures acoustic-phonetic…