Related papers: Analysis of Disfluency in Children's Speech

Speech technology systems struggle with many downstream tasks for child speech due to small training corpora and the difficulties that child speech pose. We apply a novel dataset, SpeechMaturity, to state-of-the-art transformer models to…

Laughing, sighing, stuttering, and other forms of paralanguage do not contribute any direct lexical meaning to speech, but they provide crucial propositional context that aids semantic and pragmatic processes such as irony. It is thus…

Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variability across words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-based…

We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a…

Conversational speech often consists of deviations from the speech plan, producing disfluent utterances that affect downstream NLP tasks. Removing these disfluencies is necessary to create fluent and coherent speech. This paper presents…

Speech processing techniques are useful for analyzing speech and language development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who are often varied and delayed in acquiring these skills. Early identification and intervention are…

We present a syntactic dependency treebank for naturalistic child and child-directed speech in English (MacWhinney, 2000). Our annotations largely followed the guidelines of the Universal Dependencies project (UD (Zeman et al., 2022)), with…

A key desiderata for inclusive and accessible speech recognition technology is ensuring its robust performance to children's speech. Notably, this includes the rapidly advancing neural network based end-to-end speech recognition systems.…

Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of…

Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how these adult inferences as listeners reflect…

This paper introduces a non-native speech corpus consisting of narratives from fifty 5- to 6-year-old Chinese-English children. Transcripts totaling 6.5 hours of children taking a narrative comprehension test in English (L2) are presented,…

This paper presents results on Speaker Recognition (SR) for children's speech, using the OGI Kids corpus and GMM-UBM and GMM-SVM SR systems. Regions of the spectrum containing important speaker information for children are identified by…

Interactions involving children span a wide range of important domains from learning to clinical diagnostic and therapeutic contexts. Automated analyses of such interactions are motivated by the need to seek accurate insights and offer…

Speech disfluency commonly occurs in conversational and spontaneous speech. However, standard Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models struggle to accurately recognize these disfluencies because they are typically trained on fluent…

Speech foundation models, trained on vast datasets, have opened unique opportunities in addressing challenging low-resource speech understanding, such as child speech. In this work, we explore the capabilities of speech foundation models on…

Speech disorders such as stuttering disrupt the normal fluency of speech by involuntary repetitions, prolongations and blocking of sounds and syllables. In addition to these disruptions to speech fluency, most adults who stutter (AWS) also…

Disfluencies are a natural feature of spontaneous human speech but are typically absent from the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs). This absence can diminish the perceived naturalness of synthesized speech, which is an important…

The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of…

When faced with self-regulation challenges, children have been known the use their language to inhibit their emotions and behaviors. Yet, to date, there has been a critical lack of evidence regarding what patterns in their speech children…

Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires…