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Investigating Prompt Difficulty In An Automatically Scored Speaking Performance Assessment, Troy L. Cox

Theses and Dissertations

Speaking assessments for second language learners have traditionally been expensive to administer because of the cost of rating the speech samples. To reduce the cost, many researchers are investigating the potential of using automatic speech recognition (ASR) as a means to score examinee responses to open-ended prompts. This study examined the potential of using ASR timing fluency features to predict speech ratings and the effect of prompt difficulty in that process. A speaking test with ten prompts representing five different intended difficulty levels was administered to 201 subjects. The speech samples obtained were then (a) rated by human raters holistically, …