UCL Vowel Trainer

Introduction

We have developed software that is designed to help you understand the vowels of southern British English. The basic approach is simple: It plays you an English word such as 'part', you have to choose which word you heard from a few different choices (e.g., 'pet', 'part', 'pat', 'putt'), and then the computer tells you whether you were right or wrong. The training works well because it plays you many examples of vowels spoken by different speakers and in different word contexts. For example, we've used this software with German university students; before training they were able to correctly identify 65% of English vowels on average, but after 5 training sessions they were 85% correct. We cannot predict how much you will learn, but almost everyone that we've tested were able to improve.

The software was developed at UCL by Paul Iverson and Bronwen Evans.

System Requirements

• Windows: Intel¨ Pentium¨ II 450MHz or faster (or equivalent)
• Macintosh OS X: PowerPC¨ G3 500MHz or faster, Intel Coreª Duo 1.33GHz or faster

Demo Version

A demo version is available. It is similar to the full version, but there is only one talker (the full version has 10) and you can only run short practice sessions (the full version has longer training sessions). It will run in your web browser, provided that you have a recent version of Flash installed. The software is here.

Full Version

Buy full version now for £20. Download link and password will be emailed