Reading Miscue Detection in Primary School through Automatic Speech Recognition

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 diagnosis systems. This study investigates how efficiently state-of-the-art (SOTA) pretrained ASR models recognize Dutch native children speech and manage to detect reading miscues. We found that Hubert Large finetuned on Dutch speech achieves SOTA phoneme-level child speech recognition (PER at 23.1\%), while Whisper (Faster Whisper Large-v2) achieves SOTA word-level performance (WER at 9.8\%). Our findings suggest that Wav2Vec2 Large and Whisper are the two best ASR models for reading miscue detection. Specifically, Wav2Vec2 Large shows the highest recall at 0.83, whereas Whisper exhibits the highest precision at 0.52 and an F1 score of 0.52.