DHB: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Dynamics of Second Language Fluency

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This project will develop and test psycholinguistic models of the relationship between first language fluency, second language competence and second language fluency. These models will be applied toward the automatic assessment of fluency in a second language. The project involves a unique collaboration between researchers with backgrounds in second-language pedagogy, testing methodology, linguistics, speech and language technology, and psychology, and is organized around a common set of data, namely oral presentations given by university students in third year Mandarin classes. These student performances are videotaped, transcribed and rated by trained raters who rate the students' fluency according to a custom-designed and validated testing procedure. The same students will be recruited at the beginning of the semester to participate in psycholinguistic experiments to measure their first language fluency, and related studies will be conducted during the course of the year. The results from expert rating of second-language fluency will be correlated with the psycholinguistic studies of first-language fluency. In parallel with this, the team will develop algorithms that will automatically assign scores to a student's second-language performance that will correlate with expert judgments. These algorithms will range from low-level signal processing methods to estimate such factors as syllable rate and pause duration, to Dynamic Bayesian Networks that combine information from large number of sources to improve the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition on the data. The results of this work will be both a better understanding of what it means to be fluent in a second language, as well as robust methods that will allow for objective automatic assessment of fluency.