A System for Assessing Children Reading at School

In this paper we describe a system for analyzing the reading errors made by children of the primary and middle schools. To assess the reading skills of children in terms of reading accuracy and speed, a standard reading achievement test, developed by educational psychologists and named “Prove MT” (MT reading test), is used in the Italian schools. This test is based on a set of texts specific for different ages, from 7 to 13 years old. At present, during the test children are asked to read aloud short stories, while teachers manually write down the reading errors on a sheet and then compute a total score based on several measures, such as duration of the whole reading, number of read syllables per second, number and type of errors, etc. The system we have developed is aimed to support the teachers in this task by automatically detecting the reading errors and estimating the needed measures. To do this we use an automatic speech-to-text transcription system that employs a language model (LM) trained over the texts containing the stories to read. In addition, we embed in the LM an error model that allows to take into account typical reading errors, mostly consisting in pronunciation errors, substitutions of syllables or words, word truncation, etc. To evaluate the performance of our system we collected 20 audio recordings, uttered by 8-13 years old children, reading a novel belonging to “Prove MT” set. It is worth mentioning that the error model proposed in this paper for assessing the reading capabilities of children performs closely to an “oracle” error model obtained from manual transcriptions of the readings themselves.