Phoneme confusion modeling reveals common Mandarin pronunciation errors in Uyghur speakers, suggesting robust methods for language teaching systems.
This study addresses the problem of Chinese pronunciation errors made by native Uyghur speakers by proposing a phoneme confusion modeling framework that integrates cross-linguistic phonological comparison and data-driven methods. Based on speech transfer theory, a corpus of 52,510 standard and non-standard pronunciations (total duration 167.2 hours) was constructed. The dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm was employed to align phoneme sequences, and Apriori association rule mining was used to uncover high-frequency confusion patterns. The study found that differences in sound, like the lack of retroflex consonants and the simplification of compound vowels, caused systematic errors. For example, the high-frequency substitution of affricates “ch→q” (62.5%) and compound vowels “uo→o/u” (76.1%). Data-driven methods further validated the phonological hypotheses and identified context-dependent phenomena (such as “ian→an” medial weakening). The confusion rule base achieved a robustness of F1-score 0.87. The quantitative model based on the confusion matrix can be integrated into intelligent speech assessment systems to provide real-time corrective feedback (e.g., “‘uo’ detected as misread as ‘o’, probability 76.1%”). This study provides an interpretable rule base and dynamic alignment technical foundation for cross-language pronunciation error correction algorithms, which has theoretical and practical significance for optimizing computer-assisted language teaching systems.
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Arkin et al. (2025) studied this question.