Adapting a duration synthesis model to rate children's oral reading prosody

We describe an automated method to assess children’s oral reading using a prosodic synthesis model trained on multiple adults’ speech. We evaluate it against a previous method that correlated the prosodic contours of children’s oral reading against adult narrations of the same sentences. We compare how well the two methods predict fluency and comprehension test scores and gains of 55 children ages 7-10 who used Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor. The new method does better on both tasks without requiring an adult narration of every sentence.

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