Production of Mandarin consonant aspiration and monophthongs in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Impaired speech sound production adds difficulties to social communication in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), while a limited attempt has been made to figure out the speech sound production among Mandarin-speaking children with ASD. The current study conducted both auditory-perceptual scoring and quantitative acoustic analysis of speech sound imitated by 27 Mandarin-speaking children with ASD (3.33-7.00 years) and 30 chronological-age-matched typically developing (TD) children. Auditory-perceptual scoring showed significantly lower scores for aspirated/unaspirated consonants and monophthongs in children with ASD. Moreover, the correlation between the developmental age of language and production accuracy in children with ASD emphasised the importance of language assessment. The quantitative acoustic analysis further indicated that the ASD group produced a much shorter voice onset time for aspirated consonants and showed a reduced vowel space than the TD group. Early interventions focusing on these production patterns should be introduced to improve the speech sound production in Mandarin-speaking children with ASD.

Pareto-Optimized Non-Negative Matrix Factorization Approach to the Cleaning of Alaryngeal Speech Signals

“…Kim et al [46] used one-and two-dimensional convolutional neural networks to classify alaryngeal speech. Feng et al [47] found that acoustic investigations can reveal that impaired speech has a substantially shorter voice start time for aspirated consonants, as well as a smaller vowel spacing. Vieira et al [48] presented a non-intrusive voice-quality classifier based on the tree convolutional neural network for measuring user satisfaction with speech communication platforms.…”