Acoustic characterization and perceptual analysis of the relative importance of prosody in speech of people with Down syndrome

Corrales-Astorgano, Mario; Mancebo, David Escudero; González-Ferreras, César

doi:10.1016/j.specom.2018.03.006

Cited by 24 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…In our study, instead, prosody was assessed by leaving aside the well-known difficulties of pronunciation of individuals with Down syndrome. Regardless of their intelligibility problems, prosody alone makes the speech of these individuals sound atypical [39]. Therefore, the development of an automatic speech assessment only focused on prosody in Down syndrome represents a relevant contribution.…”

Section: Analysis Of the Classification Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, four additional temporal features were added: the silence and sounding percentages, silences per second and the mean silences. The complete description of these features can be found in previous research [39]. In this work, only prosodic features (frequency, energy and temporal) were used because spectral features improve speaker identification, and classifiers can be adapted to each speaker in the classification process.…”

Section: Feature Extraction and Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Automatic Assessment of Prosodic Quality in Down Syndrome: Analysis of the Impact of Speaker Heterogeneity

et al. 2019

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Prosody is a fundamental speech element responsible for communicative functions such as intonation, accent and phrasing, and prosodic impairments of individuals with intellectual disabilities reduce their communication skills. Yet, technological resources have paid little attention to prosody. This study aims to develop an automatic classifier to predict the prosodic quality of utterances produced by individuals with Down syndrome, and to analyse how inter-individual heterogeneity affects assessment results. A therapist and an expert in prosody judged the prosodic appropriateness of a corpus of Down syndrome' utterances collected through a video game. The judgments of the expert were used to train an automatic classifier that predicts prosodic quality by using a set of fundamental frequency, duration and intensity features. The classifier accuracy was 79.3% and its true positive rate 89.9%. We analyzed how informative each of the features was for the assessment and studied relationships between participants' developmental level and results: interspeaker variability conditioned the relative weight of prosodic features for automatic classification and participants' developmental level was related to the prosodic quality of their productions. Therefore, since speaker variability is an intrinsic feature of individuals with Down syndrome, it should be considered to attain an effective automatic prosodic assessment system.

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Section: Analysis Of the Classification Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Feature Extraction and Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Assessment of Prosodic Quality in Down Syndrome: Analysis of the Impact of Speaker Heterogeneity

et al. 2019

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“…Despite these claims, most studies dealing with prosody in individuals with DS have focused on prosody production rather than comprehension. The results demonstrate prosodic abnormalities mainly on frequency, duration and intensity, which are attributed to physiological peculiarities, such as smaller vocal tract compared to the size of the tongue, soft palatal shape and muscular hypotonia (e.g., Lee et al, 2009;Albertini et al, 2010;Kent and Vorperian, 2013;Rochet-Capellan and Dohen, 2015;Corrales-Astorgano et al, 2016, 2018. In contrast to the large number of production studies, very few studies have explored the perception abilities of prosody in children and adolescents with DS (Pettinato and Verhoeven, 2009;Stojanovik, 2011;Naess, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Narrative Abilities of Adults’ With Down Syndrome as a Window to Their Morphosyntactic, Socio-Cognitive, and Prosodic Abilities

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Marinis

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Down syndrome (DS) is the most common developmental disorder characterized by mild to moderate intellectual disability. Several studies have reported poor language and prosodic skills and contradictory results regarding individuals' with DS sociocognitive skills, whereas most of them have focused on children with DS. The present study attempts to explore adults' with DS language, socio-cognitive and prosodic abilities via the use of story-retellings. Twenty adults with DS and two groups of TD children, one matched to their expressive vocabulary (TD-EVT) and the other matched to their non-verbal mental age (TD-RCPM), took part in the present study. Participants listened to a story while viewing a wordless picture PowerPoint presentation on a computer screen, and then, they were instructed to retell the story while viewing the pictures for a second time. Each participant listened to two stories, one with "lively" and one with "flat" prosody. Results revealed that adults' with DS performance was comparable with the one presented by the TD-RCPM group, whereas the TD-EVT group performed significantly better in almost all variables. Individuals' with DS renarrations, however, contained significantly less complement clauses and internal state terms (related or not related to Theory of Mind-ToM) compared to the re-narrations of both control groups. In contrast, the group with DS performed similarly to both control groups in comprehension questions related to main characters' internal state terms and significantly better compared to the TD-RCPM group in questions related to ToM. In terms of prosody, all three groups performed significantly better on story structure and comprehension questions when prosody was "lively" compared "flat" prosody. DS group's re-narrations did not contain enough internal state terms, not due to their inability in recognizing them, but due to their poor morphosyntactic abilities, which did not allow them to find the proper means to express the main characters' internal states. Prosody facilitated participants with DS in the comprehension and re-narration. This suggests that intervention programs based on prosody could support the language skills of adults with DS.

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“…To this respect, some authors have defended language therapy targeting the practice of expressive language as a method to increase communicative effectiveness [60]. The study in [61] adds weight to the argument that it is important to train prosody so as to gain quality in the speech of people with DS and the tool Pradia is a step forward in this line. The study in [61] has also shown the importance of intonation and rhythm in the automatic identification of a voice, as pertaining to individuals with DS.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The study in [61] adds weight to the argument that it is important to train prosody so as to gain quality in the speech of people with DS and the tool Pradia is a step forward in this line. The study in [61] has also shown the importance of intonation and rhythm in the automatic identification of a voice, as pertaining to individuals with DS. In this study, a perception test was performed using samples where the prosody of utterances from a group of typically developing individuals was transferred to the utterances of a group of individuals with DS.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Prosody in a Video Game-Based Learning Approach

Aguilar

2019

MTI

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With the growth in popularity of video games in our society many teachers have worked to incorporate gaming into their classroom. It is generally agreed that by adding something fun to the learning process students become more engaged and, consequently, retain more knowledge. However, although the characteristics of video games facilitate the dynamics of the educational process it is necessary to plan a pedagogical project that includes delimitation of learning goals and profile of the addressees, the conditions of application of the educational project, and the methodologies of evaluation of the learning progress. This is how we can make a real difference between gamification and video game based learning. The paper addresses the design of an educational resource for special education needs (SEN) students that aims to help teach communicative skills related to prosody. The technological choices made to support the pedagogic issues that underlie the educational product, the strategies to convert learning content into playful material, and the methodology to obtain measures of its playability and effectiveness are described. The results of the motivation test certified that the video game is useful in encouraging the users to exercise their voice and the indicators of the degree of achievement of the learning goals serve to identify the most affected prosodic skills.

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Acoustic characterization and perceptual analysis of the relative importance of prosody in speech of people with Down syndrome

Cited by 24 publications

References 39 publications

Automatic Assessment of Prosodic Quality in Down Syndrome: Analysis of the Impact of Speaker Heterogeneity

Automatic Assessment of Prosodic Quality in Down Syndrome: Analysis of the Impact of Speaker Heterogeneity

Narrative Abilities of Adults’ With Down Syndrome as a Window to Their Morphosyntactic, Socio-Cognitive, and Prosodic Abilities

Learning Prosody in a Video Game-Based Learning Approach

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