Assessment of reading proficiency is typically done by asking subjects to read a text passage silently and then answer questions related to the text. An alternate approach, measuring reading-aloud proficiency, has been shown to correlate well with the aforementioned common method and is used as a paradigm in this paper. We describe a system that is able to automatically score two types of child...

A prevention trial tested the efficacy of INSIGHTS into Children's Temperament as compared to a Read Aloud attention control condition in reducing student disruptive behavior and enhancing student competence and teacher classroom management. Participants included 116 first and second grade students, their parents, and their 42 teachers in six inner city schools. Teachers completed the Sutter-Ey...

Our study examines the extent to which AfrikaansSpanish bilingual speakers show L1-L2 interactions in the rhythmic properties of their two languages. Eight Afrikaans-Spanish bilingual speakers who live in Patagonia, Argentina read aloud sentences in Afrikaans (their L1) and Spanish (their L2), and ten Afrikaans and eight Spanish monolingual control speakers read aloud sentences in their respect...

The DigLIn project aims at providing concrete solutions for adult literacy students by developing and testing L2 literacy acquisition material in four different languages and by employing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to analyse the learner’s read speech output and provide feedback. We develop the technology, design sample exercises for different languages (Dutch, English, German and Finni...

This study investigates methods for automatically evaluating the appropriateness of F0 contours in the task of automated assessment of non-native read aloud speech. The F0 contour of a test taker’s spoken response is represented as a fixed-dimension vector with a word-level F0 value corresponding to each word in the prompt text. This vector is then correlated with gold standard vectors extracte...

In three experiments we examined the effect of schema activation on professional translators who had to read and translate or to read aloud visually presented texts. In Experiment 1, text understanding was improved by presenting a summary before reading aloud the texts. However, prior presentation of the summary reduced comprehension when participants had to translate them (sight translation). ...

In the present study Dutch vowel formant characteristics of laryngectomized tracbeoesophageal speakers are investigated.. Both vowels in CV nonsense syllables (/al, Iii, and /u/), and vowels of stressed syllables in read-aloud text are studied. It appeared that in the nonsense syllables the first formants were comparable to those ·of normal speakers, but that the second formants were higher tha...