Relating utterance fluency to perceived fluency of interpreting

Abstract

The prospect of automated scoring for interpreting fluency has prompted investigations into the predictability of human raters’ perceived fluency based on acoustically measured utterance fluency. Recently, Han, Chen, Fu and Fan (2020) correlated ten utterance fluency measures with raters’ perceived fluency ratings. To verify previous correlational patterns, the present study partially replicated Han et al. (2020). Our analysis shows that most of the correlations observed in Han et al. (2020) were successfully replicated. To produce overall interim estimates of the true relationships, we conducted a mini meta-analysis of correlation coefficients reported in six relevant studies, informed by the “continuously cumulating meta-analysis” approach (Braver et al. 2014). We found that phonation time ratio, mean length of run, and speech rate had relatively strong correlations with perceived fluency. We discuss these findings in light of automated fluency assessment and the need for replication and meta-analysis in translation and interpreting studies.