Traditional assessments of public speaking skills rely on human scoring. We report a n initial study on the development of an automated scoring model for public speaking performances using multimodal technologies. Task design, rubric development, and human rating were conducted according to standards in educational assessment. An initial corpus of 17 speakers with four speaking tasks was collec...

The importance of speaking style authentication from human speech is gaining an increasing attention and concern from the engineering community. The importance comes from the demand to enhance both the naturalness and efficiency of spoken language human-machine interface. Our work in this research focuses on proposing, implementing, and testing speaker-dependent and text-dependent speaking styl...

In the past few years, the smart grids have attracted more and more attention. The fact that these systems are based on the pervasive use of new Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) opens new perspectives in an aim to improve the electrical grid performances. One of the most commonly deployed technologies in such a real environment is the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) technology...

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...

Students' speaking abilities are widely thought to play an important role in classes and high school English teachers endeavor improve their students' performance. The purpose of the current study was examine whether incorporating videos before after sessions had a substantial impact on students’ development. participants were 78 students Kien Giang province. used quasi-experimental mixed-metho...

This paper aims to enhance the performance of a TTS system by generating various speaking styles. First we describe three speaking styles (Radio News, Political Address and Conversation) and compare the prosodic features found in these authentic styles with the prosody in “neutral” speech uttered by the eLite TTS system ([1]). Differences concern about 20 prosodic characteristics (F0 span, spee...

This paper aims to enhance the performance of a TTS system by generating various speaking styles. First we describe three speaking styles (Radio News, Political Address and Conversation) and compare the prosodic features found in these authentic styles with the prosody in “neutral” speech uttered by the eLite TTS system ([1]). Differences concern about 20 prosodic characteristics (F0 span, spee...

the present study was conducted to compare the effect of individual and group pre-task planning on efl learners’ accuracy and complexity in speaking. to fulfill the purpose of the study, 60 intermediate female learners at the first grade of high school were chosen by means of a sample preliminary english test (pet) and randomly divided into two experimental groups of 30 students; the individual...

In the present research we investigated the perception of Spanish stress in German-speaking listeners in comparison with native Spanish listeners. We used a cognitively demanding Odd-One-Out task and stimuli with variability in voice and/or in intonation. The main findings showed that the German-speaking listeners were able to perceive the Spanish lexical stress to a very high degree (76% of co...

The present study examined the number-specific parental language input to Mandarin- and English-speaking preschool-aged children. Mandarin and English transcripts from the CHILDES database were examined for amount of numeric speech, specific types of numeric speech and syntactic frames in which numeric speech appeared. The results showed that Mandarin-speaking parents talked about number more f...