Recent advances in ASR and spoken language processing have led to improved systems for automated assessment for spoken language. However, it is still challenging for automated scoring systems to achieve high performance in terms of the agreement with human experts when applied to non-native children’s spontaneous speech. The subpar performance is mainly caused by the relatively low recognition ...

Over the past decades, the relation between reading skills and eye movement behavior has been well documented in English-speaking cohorts. As English and German differ substantially with regard to orthographic complexity (i.e. grapheme-phoneme correspondence), we aimed to delineate specific characteristics of how reading speed and reading comprehension interact with eye movements in typically d...

In March 2020, schools in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were suspended. Online learning became a substitute for traditional face-to-face learning. This study addresses implications this shift attitudes university-level English majored students taking listening and speaking course. The investigated students’ towards: a) importance English; b) teachers use emails to communicate their feedback on En...

BACKGROUND Quality and frequency variability of adolescents' voice, during puberty, in different phonation tasks. AIM To analyze the vocal stability of adolescents in three different phonation tasks using a voice perceptual analysis. METHOD Participants were male students (n = 46 individuals), ranging in age from 13 to 15 years, from a public school in Campinas--SP. Voice samples were recor...

The assessment of second language (L2) speaking has long been an important yet challenging area of research in language testing. L2 testers are often concerned with designing authentic speaking tasks that resemble real-life speaking activities so that score interpretations are generalizable to non-test contexts. The conversational nature of speaking skills has promoted the widespread integratio...

This paper examines techniques that allow a well-trained source system built on one task to be rapidly adapted, or ported, to another target task. The two tasks considered in this paper are Hub5, or Switchboard, as the source system and VoiceMail as the target task. The two tasks are acoustically similar, both being telephonebandwidth speech tasks, but differ in speaking style. SwitchBoard is c...

In Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research, subject and session specific training data is usually used to ensure satisfying classification results. In this paper, we show that neural responses to different speaking tasks recorded with functional Near Infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) are consistent enough across speakers to robustly classify speaking modes with models trained exclusively on other s...