Pauses and Speech Rates in Assessing Fluency of English Speech
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초록
An experiment was conducted to clarify how silent pauses and speech rate influence the human raters’ fluency evaluation of English speech. Three groups (30 English native listeners, 30 Korean high level listeners, and 30 Korean low level listeners) totaling 90 listeners rated the controlled test materials which were manipulated to have various levels of pause and speech rate. In order to exclude all other unrelated factors such as segmental effects, more precisely manipulated stimuli compared to previous research were created. Results, in general, were obtained through a statistical analysis known as the Mixed Effects Model and a technique called Random Forests. These results verified that pause related features such as pause frequency and pause position play a more important role than speech rate or raters’ English proficiency. This study is expected to help determine the weight of features affecting evaluation results and identify human raters’ performance patterns in speech evaluation.
Abstract
An experiment was conducted to clarify how silent pauses and speech rate influence the human raters’ fluency evaluation of English speech. Three groups (30 English native listeners, 30 Korean high level listeners, and 30 Korean low level listeners) totaling 90 listeners rated the controlled test materials which were manipulated to have various levels of pause and speech rate. In order to exclude all other unrelated factors such as segmental effects, more precisely manipulated stimuli compared to previous research were created. Results, in general, were obtained through a statistical analysis known as the Mixed Effects Model and a technique called Random Forests. These results verified that pause related features such as pause frequency and pause position play a more important role than speech rate or raters’ English proficiency. This study is expected to help determine the weight of features affecting evaluation results and identify human raters’ performance patterns in speech evaluation.
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