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