ISCA Archive SLaTE 2009
ISCA Archive SLaTE 2009

Evaluating diglossic aspects of an automated test of spoken modern standard Arabic

Jared Bernstein, Masanori Suzuki, Jian Cheng, Ulrike Pado

A fully automatic test of facility with spoken Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) was developed and evaluated. The paper notes the diglossic situation of MSA (where colloquial and formal languages are quite distinct), and presents the structure and scoring of the test. Evaluation of the reliability and validity of the test is described, with added analyses that compare not just learners and native speakers, but also educated and uneducated speakers of the formal dialect. Results suggest scores from this commercial test are suitable in selecting MSA speakers.