A Native-Reference Coordinate Geometry for L2 Pronunciation Deviation Using Self-Supervised Speech Models

Tina Raissi; Nhan Phan; Mikko Kurimo

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arXiv · 2609.28060

A Native-Reference Coordinate Geometry for L2 Pronunciation Deviation Using Self-Supervised Speech Models

Tina Raissi·Nhan Phan·Mikko Kurimo

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Abstract

Self-supervised speech models encode rich phonetic information, but it remains unclear how to transform this information into interpretable metrics for second-language (L2) pronunciation assessment in spontaneous speech. We propose a native-reference coordinate geometry in which phone-class averages from native speech define a low-dimensional reference subspace, and L2 speech is evaluated by its distance to matching native phone-class coordinates. Unlike prior distance-based approaches, our method does not require parallel recordings with matched linguistic content or dedicated pronunciation labels. Across different self-supervised encoders and modeling choices, the resulting native-reference distances show negative Spearman correlations up to -0.5 with speaking proficiency, indicating that higher-proficiency speakers tend to lie closer to the native-reference space.

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Tina Raissi, Nhan Phan, Mikko Kurimo. 2026-09-23. A Native-Reference Coordinate Geometry for L2 Pronunciation Deviation Using Self-Supervised Speech Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28060

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