The ProA Online Tool for Prosody Assessment and Its Use for the Definition of Acoustic Models for Prosodic Evaluation of L2 Spanish Learners

Abstract

Assessment of prosody is not usually included in the evaluation of oral expression skills of L2 Spanish learners. Some of the factors that probably explain this fact are the lack of adequate materials, correctness models and tools to carry out this assessment. This paper describes one of the results of the ProA (Prosody Assessment) project, a web tool for the online assessment of Spanish prosody. The tool allows the online development of evaluation tests and rubrics, the completion of these tests and their remote scoring. An example of use of this tool for research purposes is also presented: three prosodic parameters (global energy, speech rate, F0 range) of a set of oral productions of two L2 Spanish learners, collected using the tests developed in the project, were evaluated by three L2 Spanish teachers using the web tool and the rubrics developed also in the ProA project, and the obtained ratings were compared with the results of the acoustic analysis of these parameters in the material to determine to what extent there was a correlation between evaluators’ judgements and prosodic parameters. The results obtained may be of interest, for example, for the development of future automatic prosody assessment systems.