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Article published In:
Translation and Interpreting Studies
Vol. 18:3 (2023) ► pp.421–447

Relating utterance fluency to perceived fluency of interpreting

A partial replication and a mini meta-analysis

ORCID logo | Xiamen University
ORCID logo | Xiamen University

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.

Keywords: utterance fluency, perceived fluency, consecutive interpreting, replication, meta-analysis
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Literature review
    • Relationship between utterance fluency and perceived fluency of interpreting
    • The target study for replication: Han et al. (2020)
    • Replication research
    • Meta-analysis
  • Methods
    • The replication study
    • Data source
    • Calculation of utterance fluency measures
    • Measurement of perceived fluency
    • Data analysis
    • Mini meta-analysis
  • Results
    • The replication results
    • Replication analysis
    • Mini meta-analysis results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.20091.han
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