An Articulatory-Aware CNN-BiGRU-Attention Framework for Explainable Phoneme-Level Pronunciation Assessment in ESL Speech

Proper pronunciation at the phoneme level has been known to be one of the most enduring problems affecting the Second Language learners of the English language (ESL) since the slight pronunciatory variations in the learned language may greatly influence its communicative power and the level of intelligibility. The existing methods of pronunciation evaluation, which are mostly made using automatic speech recognition (ASR), place their results at the word level or the sentence level and offer generic numerical scores with little linguistic meaning, which is not effective in assessing accented speech and subsequent correction. To overcome these shortcomings, the paper introduces an articulatory-conscious recognition model of phonemes that provides fine-grained and interpretable feedback to enhance ESL pronunciation. The novelty of the work is in the combination of a hybrid CNN-BiGRU-Attention architecture and an Articulatory Error Mapping Engine, which symbolically transforms phoneme-level articulation errors into articulatory errors, based on place of articulation, manner, voicing, and vowel quality articulatory deviations. The experimental analysis performed on the non-native English speech had a phoneme recognition accuracy of 91.4 that was much higher than the commercial ASR-based systems (78.3) and the traditional HMM-GMM baselines (70.5). The system was very sensitive to ESL pronunciation errors, making it 84 percent accurate in substitution, 82 percent accurate in deletion and 79 percent accurate in insertions in detection and articulatory mapping was over 87 percent accurate in all categories. The framework was tested in Python with deep learning packages and speech processing toolkits, and provided a scalable, explainable, and learner-focused system that can be used to support the intelligent training of ESL pronunciation and provide pedagogically significant feedback at the phoneme level.

@article{Bindhu2026,
  title     = {An Articulatory-Aware CNN-BiGRU-Attention Framework for Explainable Phoneme-Level Pronunciation Assessment in ESL Speech},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {17},
  number    = {2},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {P. Bindhu and Jasgurpreet Singh Chohan and M. Durairaj and Megha Sawangikar and N. Neelima and Elangovan Muniyandy and G. Sanjiv Ra and Loay F. Hussien},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170261},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170261}
}