Two methods for assessing oral reading prosody

Abstract

We compare two types of models to assess the prosody of children's oral reading. Template models measure how well the child's prosodic contour in reading a given sentence correlates in pitch, intensity, pauses, or word reading times with an adult narration of the same sentence. We evaluate template models directly against a common rubric used to assess fluency by hand, and indirectly by their ability to predict fluency and comprehension test scores and gains of 10 children who used Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor; the template models outpredict the human assessment. We also use the same set of adult narrations to train generalized models for mapping text to prosody, and use them to evaluate children's prosody. Using only durational features for both types of models, the generalized models perform better at predicting fluency and comprehension posttest scores of 55 children ages 7--10, with adjusted R2 of 0.6. Such models could help teachers identify which students are making adequate progress. The generalized models have the additional advantage of not requiring an adult narration of every sentence.