Helmer Strik

Radboud University | RU · Centre for Language Studies

Recent advancements in large pretrained Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have opened new avenues for digital education applications, such as reading diagnosis in primary schools. Leveraging ASR in this context can enhance teachers' ability to assess students' reading skills efficiently while offering students interactive reading exercises...

Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) for non-native children leverages speech technology to aid in improving pronunciation accuracy. Hybrid automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, combining neural networks with statistical methods, are well-suited for CAPT due to their high accuracy and reduced latency, especially in limited search sp...

Automatic reading diagnosis systems can benefit both teachers for more efficient scoring of reading exercises and students for accessing reading exercises with feedback more easily. However, there are limited studies on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for child speech in languages other than English, and limited research on ASR-based reading dia...

Automatic reading diagnosis systems can benefit both teachers for more efficient scoring of reading exercises and students for accessing reading exercises with feedback more easily. However, there are limited studies on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for child speech in languages other than English, and limited research on ASR-based reading dia...

Analyzing the errors that children make on their ways to becoming fluent readers and writers can provide invaluable scientific insights into the processes that underlie literacy acquisition. To this end, we present in this paper an extension of an earlier developed spelling error detection and classification algorithm for Dutch, so that reading err...

The last few years have witnessed an increasing demand for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology that can be successfully implemented in educational applications supporting the development of language skills. The main reason for this is the need for digital applications that can support the development of speaking and reading skills in the...

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the world's leading neurodegenerative disease, which often results in communication difficulties. Analysing speech can serve as a diagnostic tool for identifying the condition. The recent ADReSS challenge provided a dataset for AD classification and highlighted the utility of manual transcriptions. In this study, we used...

Automatic assessment of reading fluency using automatic speech recognition (ASR) holds great potential for early detection of reading difficulties and subsequent timely intervention. Precise assessment tools are required, especially for languages other than English. In this study, we evaluate six state-of-the-art ASR-based systems for automatically...

Individuals with dysarthria suffer from difficulties in speech production and consequent reductions in speech intelligibility, which is an important concept for diagnosing and assessing effectiveness of speech therapy. In the current study, we investigate which acoustic-phonetic features are most relevant and important in automatically assessing in...

With recent advancements in automatic speech recognition (ASR), ASR-based educational applications have become increasingly viable. This paper presents a preliminary investigation into whether peer evaluations of the speech produced during the use of these applications, by primary school-aged children, is reliable and valid. Twenty-one Dutch primar...

Voicebots have provided a new avenue for supporting the development of language skills, particularly within the context of second language learning. Voicebots, though, have largely been geared towards native adult speakers. We sought to assess the performance of two state-of-the-art ASR systems, Wav2Vec2.0 and Whisper AI, with a view to developing...

Speech intelligibility (SI) is essential in communication and second language learning. In this study, non-native SI was measured through Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) scores and Orthographic Transcriptions (OTs) of read aloud sentences. Seven measures automatically derived from the OTs at word and subword levels were studied. The reliability of the...

Current applications of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) based technology for second language learning often require comparisons of native and non-native speech for evaluation and feedback purposes, which are generally based on limited sets of features that might not be the most optimal ones to characterize native as opposed to non-native speech....

Speech intelligibility (SI) plays an important role in second language learning. It can be influenced by many factors and various approaches have been explored to measure it. In this study, the intelligibility of Dutch non-native speech was measured by Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and word accuracy (!"") that was automatically derived from orthograp...

Voicebots have provided a new avenue for supporting the development of language skills, particularly within the context of second language learning. Voicebots, though, have largely been geared towards native adult speakers. We sought to assess the performance of two state-of-the-art ASR systems, Wav2Vec2.0 and Whisper AI, with a view to developing...

The interest in employing automatic speech recognition (ASR) in applications for reading practice has been growing in recent years. In a previous study, we presented an ASR-based Dutch reading tutor application that was developed to provide instantaneous feedback to first-graders learning to read. We saw that ASR has potential at this stage of the...

Automatic assessment of reading fluency using automatic speech recognition (ASR) holds great potential for early detection of reading difficulties and subsequent timely intervention. Precise assessment tools are required, especially for languages other than English. In this study, we evaluate six state-of-the-art ASR-based systems for automatically...

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the world's leading neurodegenerative disease, which often results in communication difficulties. Analysing speech can serve as a diagnostic tool for identifying the condition. The recent ADReSS challenge provided a dataset for AD classification and highlighted the utility of manual transcriptions. In this study, we used...

Introduction: Speech intelligibility is an important indicator of the degree of speech impairment in pathological speech. Articulation, as a key feature of dysarthria, has been found to be a stronger contributor to intelligibility of dysarthric speech compared to voice quality, nasality, and prosody. In fact, therapy addressing articulation is oft...

The shortage of large-scale learners’ speech corpora and precise manual annotations are two major challenges for automatic L2 speech recognition and error detection in L2 speech, especially for non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages. In these cases, collecting and annotating large non-native (L2 learner) corpora for all language varieties...

Learning to read is a vital skill to function in society. Unfortunately, an increasing part of Dutch adolescents have such poor reading skills that they risk becoming functionally illiterate as adults (Gubbels et al., 2019). As such, the issue of improving reading education should be addressed as early in children’s lives as possible. Personalised...

Speaking skills generally receive little attention in traditional English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms, and this is especially the case in secondary education in Indonesia. A vocabulary deficit and poor pronunciation skills hinder learners in their efforts to improve speaking proficiency. In the present study, we investigated the effects...

Background: The increasing need for speech therapy due to our ageing population raises the demand on therapeutical resources. To meet this demand, innovative delivery of speech training is required. eHealth applications may provide a solution, as intensified and prolonged training is only possible and affordable in patients' home environment. Aim...

Learning to spell in Dutch is a difficult task that children cannot learn autonomously. Essential for developing good spelling skills is direct instruction of the spelling principles, enough practice, and feedback. With respect to direct instruction, a qualitative overview of which spelling errors are made by which type of children at which point i...

Speech intelligibility is an essential though complex construct in speech pathology. In this paper, we investigated the interrater reliability and validity of two types of intelligibility measures: a rating-based measure, through Visual Analogue Scales (VAS), and a transcription-based measure called Accuracy of Words (AcW), through two forms of ort...

Reading is a learned skill that children acquire through instruction and practice. A desirable feature of that practice is that children can read aloud under the guidance of a teacher. Unfortunately, this is not always possible to a sufficient extent because of general time-constraints in teacher-fronted education. For this reason, experts have bee...

Speech can reveal important characteristics of a person such as accent, gender, age, and health. Identifying specific pathologies in a person’s speech can be extremely useful for diagnosis, especially if this can be done automatically. In the present research, we investigate which automatically computed speech features are characteristic for distin...

The interest in employing automatic speech recognition (ASR) in applications for reading practice has been growing in recent years. In a previous study, we presented an ASR-based Dutch reading tutor application that was developed to provide instantaneous feedback to first-graders learning to read. We saw that ASR has potential at this stage of the...

Idiom processing studies have paid considerable attention to the relationship between idiomatic expressions as a whole and their constituent words. Although most research focused on the semantic properties of the constituent words, their orthographic form could also play a role in processing. To test this, we assessed both form and meaning activati...

We investigated speech intelligibility in dysarthric and non-dysarthric speakers as measured by two commonly used metrics, ratings through the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and word accuracy (AcW) through orthographic transcriptions. To gain a better understanding of how acoustic-phonetic correlates could be employed to obtain more objective measures...

Respiration is an essential and primary mechanism for speech production. We first inhale and then produce speech while exhaling. When we run out of breath, we stop speaking and inhale. Though this process is involuntary, speech production involves a systematic outflow of air during exhalation characterized by linguistic content and prosodic factors...

A vocabulary deficit negatively affects students’ language performance. Emotions such as speaking anxiety and language enjoyment in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom can affect students’ achievements as well. We investigated the effects of two Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)-based websites, I Love Indonesia (ILI) and NovoLearning...

Speech production is a complex human activity that may be affected by both physical and cognitive disorders. Since deviations in speech production can potentially reveal diseases apparently unrelated to speech, speech-based early detection is currently a topical issue. In the present research, we study whether changes in speech can indicate an upco...

Speech intelligibility is an essential though complex construct in speech pathology. It is affected by multiple contextual variables and it is often measured in different ways. In this paper, we evaluate various measures of speech intelligibility based on orthographic transcriptions, with respect to their reliability and validity. For this study, d...

In the light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the need for remote digital health assessment tools is greater than ever. This statement is especially pertinent for elderly and vulnerable populations. In this regard, the INTERSPEECH 2020 Alzheimer’s Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech (ADReSS) Challenge offers competitors the opportunity...

Learning to read is a prerequisite to participate in our knowledge society. Developing reading skills requires intensive practice with individual evaluation and guidance by teachers, which is not always feasible in traditional classroom instruction. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology could offer a solution, but so far it has been mostly...

The present study investigated intuitions of L2 learners about important properties of L2 idiomatic expressions to gain insights for research on L2 idiom processing and acquisition. More specifically, we examined (a) how reliable L2 learners’ intuitions are, (b) how much they differ from native speakers’ intuitions, and (c) whether they are better...

Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety (FLSA) is known to negatively affect the performance of foreign language learners. Among the four language skills, speaking is the most anxiety-provoking skill. We investigated the presence of FLSA in Indonesian vocational high school students and we tested whether web-based language learning might help to reduce s...

LARA (Learning and Reading Assistant) is an open source platform whose purpose is to support easy conversion of plain texts into multimodal online versions suitable for use by language learners. This involves semi-automatically tagging the text, adding other annotations and recording audio. The platform is suitable for creating texts in multiple la...

Multiword expressions such as idioms (beat about the bush), collocations (plastic surgery) and lexical bundles (in the middle of) are challenging for disciplines like Natural Language Processing (NLP), psycholinguistics and second language acquisition, due to their more or less fixed character. Idiomatic expressions are especially problematic, beca...

Idiomatic expressions like hit the road or turn the tables are known to be problematic for L2 learners, but research indicates that learning L2 idiomatic language is important. Relatively few studies, most of them focusing on English idioms, have investigated how L2 idioms are actually acquired and how this process is affected by important idiom pr...

Dysarthria is a motor speech impairment, often characterized by slow and slurred speech that is generally incomprehensible by human listeners. An understanding of the intelligibility level of the patient's dysarthric speech can provide an insight into the progression/status of the underlying cause and is essential for planning therapy. Automatic as...

This is the slide for the presentation of the conference paper 'Acoustic correlates of speech intelligibility: the usability of the eGeMAPS feature set for atypical speech'

The processing of idiomatic expressions is a topical issue in empirical research. Various factors have been found to influence idiom processing, such as idiom familiarity and idiom transparency. Information on these variables is usually obtained through norming studies. Studies investigating the effect of various properties on idiom processing have...

This paper reports on the role of technology in state-of-the-art pronunciation research and instruction, and makes concrete suggestions for future developments. The point of departure for this contribution is that the goal of second language (L2) pronunciation research and teaching should be enhanced comprehensibility and intelligibility as opposed...

Although most second language learning studies involve high-educated participants, addressing low-educated participants seems important as research suggests that education background impacts second language (L2) learning efficiency. A controversial point in the L2 learning literature is the role of corrective feedback (CF). Research on CF in relati...

This chapter examines the use of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology in the context of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and language learning and teaching research. A brief introduction to ASR is first provided, to make it clear why and how this technology can be used to the benefit of learning and development in second language...

This paper reports on the role of technology in state-of-the-art pronunciation research and instruction, and makes concrete suggestions for future developments. The point of departure for this contribution is that the goal of second language (L2) pronunciation research and teaching should be enhanced comprehensibility and intelligibility as opposed...

The majority of patients with neurological impairment like Parkinson's Disease (PD) or stroke are affected by dysarthria. Dysarthria is a motor speech impairment which negatively affects speech dimensions such as articulation and loudness. This leads to reduced intelligibility, often hindering daily life communication. Intensive and prolonged speec...