Mining Data from Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor to Analyze Development of Children's Oral Reading Prosody

1 Reading tutors can provide an unprecedented opportunity to collect and analyze large amounts of data for understanding how students learn. We trained models of oral reading prosody (pitch, intensity, and duration) on a corpus of narrations of 4558 sentences by 11 fluent adults. We used these models to evaluate the oral reading prosody of 85,209 sentences read by 55 children (mostly) 7-10 years old who used Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor during the 2005-2006 school year. We mined the resulting data to pinpoint the specific common syntactic and lexical features of text that children scored best and worst on. These features predict their fluency and comprehension test scores and gains better than previous models. Focusing on these features may help human or automated tutors improve children’s fluency and comprehension more effectively.