Automatic Intonation Recognition for the Prosodic Assessment of Language-Impaired Children

Abstract

Abstract-This study presents a preliminary investigation into the automatic assessment of language-impaired children's (LIC) prosodic skills in one grammatical aspect: sentence modalities. Three types of language impairments were studied: autism disorder (AD), pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), and specific language impairment (SLI). A control group of typically developing (TD) children that was both age and gender matched with LIC was used for the analysis. All of the children were asked to imitate sentences that provided different types of intonation (e.g., descending and rising contours). An automatic system was then used to assess LIC's prosodic skills by comparing the intonation recognition scores with those obtained by the control group. The results showed that all LIC have difficulties in reproducing intonation contours because they achieved significantly lower recognition scores than TD children on almost all studied intonations (p 0 05). Regarding the "Rising" intonation, only SLI children had high recognition scores similar to TD children, which suggests a more pronounced pragmatic impairment in AD and PDD-NOS children. The automatic approach used in this study to assess LIC's prosodic skills confirms the clinical descriptions of the subjects' communication impairments.

Social Signal Processing and Socially Assistive Robotics in Developmental Disorders

“…In (Ringeval et al, 2011), we designed a system that automatically assesses a child's grammatical prosodic skills through an intonation contours imitation task. The key idea of the system is to propose computational modeling of prosody by employing static (k-nn) and dynamic (HMM) classifiers.…”

Speech to Head Gesture Mapping in Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction

“…The segmentation is performed by intersecting the inflection points (zeros crossing points of the rate of change of the curve) for both the pitch and intensity curves, beside the points that separate between the voiced and unvoiced segments of the signal (see Figure 5 for an example of pitch and intenisty curves). When comparing the two curves together, 5 different trajectory states can result [16] (see Table II). …”

Automatic prosodic tone choice classification with Brazil’s intonation model

“…Irregular prosody is one of the symptoms of autism and other related developmental disorders (Frith and Happé 1994;Fine et al 1991;Paul et al 2005;Shriberg et al 2001;McCann and Peppé 2003). Computer programs that detect irregular prosody automatically have been employed to diagnose autism (Xu et al 2009;Ringeval et al 2011;Oller et al 2010;Diehl & Paul 2012;Van Santen et al 2010). Suprasegmental measures derived from the elements of Brazil's model have been shown to explain half of the variance in oral proficiency and comprehensibility ratings of non-native speakers Kang and Wang 2014).…”