PRAAT scripts to measure speed fluency and breakdown fluency in speech automatically

Fluency in terms of speed of speech and (lack of) hesitations such assilent and filled pauses (‘uhm’s) is part of oral proficiency. Languageassessment rubrics therefore include aspects of fluency. Measuringfluency, however, is highly time-consuming because of the manuallabour involved. The current paper aims to automatically measureaspects of L2 fluency, including filled pauses, in both Dutch andEnglish. A revised existing script and a new script for filled pausesare tested on accuracy. We also gauged whether the outcomes ofthe new script could be used for language assessment purposes byrelating the outcomes to human judgements. Without furtherinvestigations, the current script should not (yet) be used for thepurpose of assessing fluency automatically in (high-stakes) oralproficiency assessment. However, the performance of the scriptsfor measuring aspects of fluency globally and quickly are promising,especially given their stability in accuracy on new corpora.