A Model for Sibilant Distortion Detection in Children

Abstract

The distortion of sibilant sounds is a common type of speech sound disorder in European Portuguese speaking children. Speech and language pathologists (SLP) use different types of speech production tasks to assess these distortions. One of these tasks consists of the sustained production of isolated sibilants. Using these sound productions, SLPs usually rely on auditory perceptual evaluation to assess the sibilant distortions. Here we propose to use an isolated sibilant machine learning model to help SLPs assessing these distortions.Our model uses Mel frequency cepstral coefficients of the isolated sibilant phones and it was trained with data from 145 children. The analysis of the false negatives detected by the model can give insight into whether the child has a sibilant production distortion. We were able to confirm that there exist some relation between the model classification results and the distortion assessment of professional SLPs. Approximately 66% of the distortion cases identified by the model are confirmed by an SLP as having some sort of distortion or are perceived as being the production of a different sound.

Multichannel Speech Acquisition and Analysis for Computer-Aided Sigmatism Diagnosis in Children

“…Therefore, in most cases, non-normative speech corpora are registered for the needs of specific research problems and very rarely contain children's speech. According to our knowledge, except our research, there is only one published study on sigmatism based on data acquired from children [10]. The database employed for that research contained single-channel recordings of four Portuguese sibilants pronounced by children and annotated as correct or incorrect.…”

“…Solutions dedicated to speech therapy patients can hardly be found. According to our knowledge, three propositions of speech analysis methods for sigmatism diagnosis are reported in literature [8]- [10]. The first work describes a computer application designed to support the therapy of lisping in Arabic [8].…”

“…According to our knowledge, there is only one work on sigmatism detection conducted on speech data collected from children. Anjos et al [10] recorded articulation of four isolated sibilants in a group of 145 children with correct and incorrect pronunciation. Researchers proposed a method that employs SVMs trained to recognize correctly pronounced sibilants.…”

The BioVisualSpeech Corpus of Words with Sibilants for Speech Therapy Games Development

“…As a contribution to help SLPs motivating children to repeat the tasks that may lead to the correction of their speech disorder, we have been developing serious games for training the production of EP sibilants, which are controlled by the child's voice (more details in Sections 5.1-5.3). To make this possible, we have been developing machine learning approaches that are integrated into the games to detect the incorrect production of sibilant sounds [10] or to validate the correctness of produced words to help SLPs on assessing if the child has sigmatism (Section 5.4).…”