Annotation and Analyses of Temporal Aspects of Spoken Fluency

Abstract

This article presents the methodology adopted for transcribing and quantifying temporal fluency phenomena in a spoken L2 corpus (L2 English, French, and Italian by learners of different proficiency levels). The CHILDES suite is being used for transcription and analysis, and we have adapted the CHAT format in order to code disfluencies as precisely as possible. We briefly present findings for two extreme subgroups in the corpus--our most hesitant and least hesitant learners--and compare the major differences in the temporal structure of the speech of these two learner groups with a native-speaker control group. Implications of these findings for the automatic assessment of spoken fluency will be discussed.