yazawa25@interspeech_2025@ISCA

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#1 A Bayesian Approach to L2 Fluency Ratings by Native and Nonnative Listeners [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Kakeru Yazawa, Takayuki Konishi

This study investigates how native and nonnative listeners evaluate the fluency of Japanese speakers' English using a Bayesian modeling framework. Data were obtained from 16 listeners with diverse linguistic backgrounds (Cantonese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Punjabi, and Spanish), who rated English read speech samples from 180 Japanese speakers, in the J-AESOP corpus. Utterance fluency measures included speed (syllable- or segment-based articulation rate), breakdown (pause frequency and duration), and re pair (repetitions). Results revealed that nonnative listeners, particularly those with Asian language backgrounds, were generally more lenient and less reliant on speech rate than native listeners, highlighting inter-listener variability previously overlooked. Model comparisons also revealed that segment-based articulation rate better captures utterance speed fluency than the commonly adopted syllable-based articulation rate.

Subject: INTERSPEECH.2025 - Language and Multimodal