reading is essentially a process of translation of textual sequences into their phonetic representations

spoken word thus play a fundamental role in reading acquisition

highly accurate automatic speech recognition (ASR ) systems exist for many languages but they are still strongly biased towards accurate processing of adult voices

HOWEVER: in reading acquisition or reading fostering scenarios one deals with speakers whoseutterances of sequences-to-be-read exhibit peculiar characteristics

Learner 1 (L1) - is a 5-year old – pre-school bilingual (90% German, 10% Slovak) daughter of the main author of this article

three HMPL-C2 exercise 1 (E1) sessions were executed on days 1, 3 and 5 of the study

each HMPL-C2-E1 session consisted of human-testing phase followed by a mutual human-machine learning phase

in each phase, sequences consisted of 5 repetitions of syllables started with occlusive labial consonant M or B and followed by the vowel A, E, I, O or U, thus yielding sequences from “MA MA MA MA MA” to “BU BU BU BU BU"

speech recordings collected during the learning phase subsequently provided input for the acoustic-model fine-tuning process