A Database of Children's Speech

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The objective of this project is to create a database of children's read speech with the digital quality needed for speech research. Such data is unavailable today, but essential to achieving effective speech communication between children and machines. The methods to be employed include selecting appropriate texts to be read, recording good and poor readers, labelling the speech, verifying the quality of the labels, and organizing the data into an easily accessible form. A database of children's speech is a key enabling condition for applications in education, entertainment, and other socially and economically important fields. Expected direct impact of the work includes making the database available to the Linguistic Data Consortium for distribution to speech researchers. Applications include an automated reading coach that listens to children read aloud, and helps when needed. A prototype of such a coach was developed with previous NSF support, but its usability and robustness were limited because its speech recognizer was trained on adult speech. A children's speech database is necessary to achieve the required accuracy in listening.