This paper explores the importance of disfluent reading miscues (sounding-out, hesitations, whispering, elongated onsets, question intonations) in automating the assessment of children’s oral word reading tasks. Analysis showed that a significant portion (21%) of the speech obtained from grades K-2 children from predominantly Spanish-speaking families contained at least one disfluent reading mi...

This paper focuses on some characteristics of disfluencies in human-human (HHI) and human-computer (HCI) interaction corpora to outline similarities and differences. The main variables studied are disfluency rates and prosodic features. Structured, table-like input increases the disfluency rate in HCI and decreases it in HHI. Direct exposure (visibility) to the interface also increases the rate...

We investigate the feasibility of machine learning in automatic detection of disfluencies in a large syntactically annotated corpus of spontaneous spoken Dutch. We define disfluencies as chunks that do not fit under the syntactic tree of a sentence (including fragmented words, laughter, self-corrections, repetitions, abandoned constituents, hesitations and filled pauses). We use a memory-based ...

Previous research shows that pausing and disfluencies are common in non-native speech. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between fluency and pausing in Russian read-aloud speech of 12 Finnish university students and examine their fluency development during a 3.5-month study-period in Russia. To assess fluency, 30 Russian teachers rated the students’ speech samples (on a ...

Disfluency is a common occurrence in speech, and generally thought to be related to difficulty in the production system. One unexplored issue is the extent to which inhibition is required to prevent incorrect speech plans from being articulated. Therefore, we examined disfluency production in participants with AttentionDeficit/Hyper-Activity Disorder (ADHD), which is linked to deficits in inhib...

ccurately evaluating stuttering symptoms in both children and adults who stutter is the first step in the treatment of stuttering. Around the time of "Diagnosogenic theory" researchers collected speech samples from a large number of children, and attempted the categorization and development of indicators for evaluating people who stutter (PWS). Two global disfluency measures were introduced: St...

For dialogue systems to become robust, they must be able to detect disfluencies accurately and with minimal latency. To meet this challenge, here we frame incremental disfluency detection as a word-by-word tagging task and, following their recent success in Spoken Language Understanding tasks, we test the performance of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). We experiment with different inputs for R...

Nowadays, automatic speech recognizers have become quite good in recognizing well prepared fluent speech (e.g. news readings). However, the recognition of unprepared or spontaneous speech is still problematic. Some important reasons for this are that spontaneous speech is less articulated, exhibits a high speaking rate and usually contains a lot of disfluencies. The latter occur when the speake...

As spoken language systems become more conversational in nature, new interfaces are emerging with animated characters that are designed to elicit and manage a conversation with the user. In the present study, the spoken language of ten 6-to-10year-old children was compared while interacting with an animated character in the I SEE! interface and again while interacting with a human adult. Analys...

To evaluate the reading performance of children, human assessment is usually involved, where a teacher or tutor has to take time to individually estimate the performance in terms of fluency (speed, accuracy and expression). Automatic estimation of reading ability can be an important alternative or complement to the usual methods, and can improve other applications such as elearning. Techniques ...