When people speak a second language well, they tend to talk faster and hesitate less. This kind of fluency – how smoothly and quickly someone speaks – is often included in speaking test scores, like in the Aptis test, as an indicator of proficiency. But we still don’t know exactly how different aspects of fluency relate to overall language proficiency, and researching it can be slow and difficult because measuring fluency is so manual. 

This project set out to find a faster way to study fluency by testing whether it could be measured automatically in both Dutch and English. The team adapted a computer tool (originally written in PRAAT-script) to measure how fast someone speaks and how often they pause, both silently and using words like 'uhm'. A new part of the tool was created to spot filled pauses, and it was tested by calculating the accuracy of the script. Most filled pauses were correctly identified. 

The final step was to see how well the tool’s results matched up with human judgements on fluency. While the findings were promising, the researchers say more testing is needed before this tool can be used reliably in language proficiency tests.