PRAAT scripts to measure speed fluency and breakdown fluency in speech automatically

Assessment in Education Principles Policy and Practice, vol. 28, pp. 456–476

Abstract

Fluency in terms of speed of speech and (lack of) hesitations such as silent and filled pauses (‘uhm’s) is part of oral proficiency. Language assessment rubrics therefore include aspects of fluency. Measuring fluency, however, is highly time-consuming because of the manual labour involved. The current paper aims to automatically measure aspects of L2 fluency, including filled pauses, in both Dutch and English. A revised existing script and a new script for filled pauses are tested on accuracy. We also gauged whether the outcomes of the new script could be used for language assessment purposes by relating the outcomes to human judgements. Without further investigations, the current script should not (yet) be used for the purpose of assessing fluency automatically in (high-stakes) oral proficiency assessment. However, the performance of the scripts for measuring aspects of fluency globally and quickly are promising, especially given their stability in accuracy on new corpora.

Authors 3

1. Nivja H. de Jong corresponding Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   ICLON Graduate School of Teaching, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

   Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

2. Jos Pacilly Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

3. Willemijn F. L. Heeren Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands