Connecting rhythm and prominence in automatic ESL pronunciation scoring

Abstract Past studies have shown that a native Spanish speaker's use of phrasal prominence is a good indicator of her level of English prosody acquisition. Because of the cross-linguistic differences in the organization of phrasal prominence and durational contrasts, we hypothesize that those speakers with English-like prominence in their L2 speech are also expected to have acquired English-like rhythm. Statistics from a corpus of native and nonnative English confirm that speakers with an Englishlike phrasal prominence are also the ones who use English-like rhythm. Additionally, two methods of automatic score generation based on vowel duration times demonstrate a correlation of at least 0.6 between these automatic scores and subjective scores for phrasal prominence. These findings suggest that simple vowel duration measures obtained from standard automatic speech recognition methods can be salient cues for estimating subjective scores of prosodic acquisition, and of pronunciation in general

A Bayesian Classifier for Word-level Literacy Assessment

To automatically assess young children`s reading skills as demonstrated by isolated words read aloud, we propose a novel structure for a Bayesian Network classifier. Our network models the generative story among speech recognition-based features, treating pronunciation variants and reading mistakes as distinct but not independent cues to a qualitative perception of reading ability. This Bayesian approach allows us to estimate the probabilistic dependencies among many highly-correlated features, and to calculate soft decision scores based on the posterior probabilities for each class. With all proposed features, the best version of our network outperforms the C4.5 decision tree classifier by 17% and a Naive Bayes classifier by 8%, in terms of correlation with speaker-level reading scores on the Tball data set. This best correlation of 0.92 approaches the expert inter-evaluator correlation, 0.95