Automatic assessment of expressive oral reading

We investigated the automatic assessment of expressive children's oral reading of grade level text passages using a standardized rubric. After a careful review of the reading literature and a close examination of the rubric, we designed a novel set of prosodic and lexical features to characterize fluent expressive reading. A number of complementary sources of information were used to design the features, each of them motivated by research on different components of reading fluency. Features are connected to the child's reading rate, to the presence and number of pauses, filled-pauses and word-repetitions, the correlation between punctuation marks and pauses, the length of word groupings, syllable stress and duration and the location of pitch peaks and contours. The proposed features were evaluated on a corpus of 783 one-minute reading sessions from 313 students reading grade-leveled passages without assistance (cold unassisted reading). Experimental results show that the proposed lexical and prosodic features provide complementary information and are able to capture the characteristics of expressive reading. The results showed that on both the 2-point and the 4-point expressiveness scales, computer-generated ratings of expressiveness agreed with human raters better than the human raters agreed with each other. The results of the study suggest that automatic assessment of expressive oral reading can be combined with automatic measures of word accuracy and reading rate to produce an accurate multidimensional estimate of children's oral reading ability. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.