EAGER: Collaborative Research: Models of Child Speech

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In contrast to the production, modeling, and machine recognition of adult speech, which have been studied for decades, the production, acoustic modeling and recognition of child speech have not received the same level of attention. The lack of scholarly resources for dealing with children's speech is problematic as new applications for child speech and language development become increasingly important and commonplace. This is especially true for elementary school children. As children grow, their articulators grow as well, resulting in variations in their speech sounds. For example, the waveform of the word 'sunny' spoken by a 6-year old can be quite different than that of the same child when she is 9 years old. This is why current machine recognition of children's speech does not perform well for young children and does not scale up as the child grows. That is, these systems tend to be age dependent. Understanding and modeling child speech as children grow is important not only to developing better recognition systems but also for better understanding and diagnosis of speech-language pathology (SLP). As the negative long-term ramifications of deficits in early childhood development gain increasingly broad recognition, the opportunities and the need for social and health services and technological applications targeted toward young children are growing. In particular, it is now understood that early deficits in language development and literacy persist into adulthood, and the demand for SLP services in public schools is significantly outpacing supply. As a result, it is no longer feasible for clinicians and teachers to provide the most effective treatments or the necessary attention to every child. Better speech recognition systems would provide an opportunity for improved diagnosis and more intense computer-based therapy. This Early Grant for Exploratory Research project aims to model how speech and language develop during elementary school and how children with speech disorders differ in their articulation of speech sounds. Models of child speech will lead to the development of computer programs which can be used for educational as well as therapeutic purposes.Scientifically, the exploratory project will 1) reveal processes of speech production development in 20-26 elementary school-aged children through a unique combination of articulatory and acoustic analyses, and 2) develop acoustic models and eventually automatic speech recognition systems for children's speech which can be scalable with age (as opposed to being age-dependent systems). This can only be achieved by understanding how the articulation and corresponding acoustics develop with age. The different aspects of the project are therefore synergistic: findings from articulation and acoustic experiments will inform the development of algorithms essential to automatic speech recognition. Production data will include real-time 3D ultrasound recordings of the tongue, video recordings of the lips, palate impressions, microphone recordings, and accelerometer recordings of neck skin vibrations which have been shown to be beneficial in automatic speech and speaker recognition applications. The causal relationship between articulatory and acoustic variability will be explored, as will their relationship to misrecognition of child speech. Articulatory features will be incorporated into new automatic speech recognition systems along with acoustic features. The exploratory project will contribute to knowledge of variability between children, as well as variability over time as children grow and will provide, for the first time, normative data and scientific models. These can lead to robust child speech recognition systems as well as tools that will be useful for a variety of applications such as educational games, training of speech-language pathologists, automatic or semi-automatic transcription systems, and speech articulation visualization systems. It will train undergraduate and graduate students in important cross-disciplinary activities of technological and scientific significance. We believe that the proposed project is transformative in its advancement of the scientific and technological state of the art related to child speech.