Dr. Stephen Looney and colleagues from Northern Arizona University and the University of Texas-Dallas received an EAGER Collaborative Research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). EAGER grants are awarded to support "exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches."
The title of the project is "Second Language Speech Production: Formulation of Objective Speech Intelligibility Measures and Learner-Specific Feedback ". The research team will be gathering speech samples from students in ITA courses, doing acoustic analysis and listener ratings of the samples, and using them to create models for generating individualized pronunciation feedback based on highly intelligible speakers of the same L1 instead of native speakers. Congratulations Dr. Looney!