Abstract

Automatic literacy assessment is an area of research that has shown significant progress in recent years. Technology can be used to automatically administer reading tasks and analyze and interpret children's reading skills. It has the potential to transform the classroom dynamic by providing useful information to teachers in a repeatable, consistent, and affordable way. While most previous research has focused on automatically assessing children reading words and sentences, assessments of children's earlier foundational skills is needed. We address this problem in this research by automatically verifying preliterate children's pronunciations of English letter-names and the sounds each letter represents (“letter-sounds”). The children analyzed in this study were from a diverse bilingual background and were recorded in actual kindergarten to second grade classrooms. We first manually verified (accept/reject) the …

Date

2011

Authors

Matthew P Black, Abe Kazemzadeh, Joseph Tepperman, Shrikanth S Narayanan

Journal

ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing (TSLP)

Volume

7

Issue

4

Pages

1-17

Publisher

ACM