ISCA International Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2011) Venice, Italy August 24-26, 2011

What Visual Feedback Should a Reading Tutor Give Children on their Oral Reading Prosody?

Sunayana Sitaram, Jack Mostow, Yuanpeng Li, Anders Weinstein, David Yen, Joe Valeri

Project LISTEN, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

An automated reading tutor that models and evaluates children's oral reading prosody should also be able to respond dynamically with feedback they like, understand, and benefit from. We describe visual feedback that Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor generates in realtime by mapping prosodic features of children's oral reading to dynamic graphical features of displayed text. We present results from preliminary usability studies of 20 children aged 7-10. We also describe an experiment to test whether such visual feedback elicits oral reading that more closely matches the prosodic contours of adult narrations. Effective feedback on prosody could help children become fluent, expressive readers.
Index Terms. prosody, visual feedback, intelligent tutoring systems, children, speech technology for education.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Sitaram, Sunayana / Mostow, Jack / Li, Yuanpeng / Weinstein, Anders / Yen, David / Valeri, Joe (2011): "What visual feedback should a reading tutor give children on their oral reading prosody?", In SLaTE-2011, 153-156.