Related papers: Analysis of Disfluency in Children's Speech
Speech disfluencies play a role in perspective-taking and audience design in human-human communication (HHC), but little is known about their impact in human-machine dialogue (HMD). In an online Namer-Matcher task, sixty-one participants…
Studies on software tutoring systems for complex learning have shown that confusion has a beneficial relationship with the learning experience and student engagement (Arguel et al., 2017). Causing confusion can prevent boredom while signs…
LLMs serve as the backbone in SpeechLLMs, yet their behavior on spontaneous conversational input remains poorly understood. Conversational speech contains pervasive disfluencies -- interjections, edits, and parentheticals -- that are rare…
Oral narrative skills are strong predictors of later literacy development. This study examines the features of oral narratives from children who were identified by experts as requiring intervention. Using simple machine learning methods, we…
We present ChildVox, a novel benchmark for characterizing the diverse acoustic signals through which children communicate. Specifically, ChildVox follows the full developmental trajectory from birth through school age, covering…
The increasing use of children's automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems has spurred research efforts to improve the accuracy of models designed for children's speech in recent years. The current approach utilizes either open-source…
Evaluating the quality of children's utterances in adult-child dialogue remains challenging due to insufficient context-sensitive metrics. Common proxies such as Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), lexical diversity (vocd-D), and readability…
Automatic recognition systems for child speech are lagging behind those dedicated to adult speech in the race of performance. This phenomenon is due to the high acoustic and linguistic variability present in child speech caused by their…
Accurate detection of disfluencies in spoken language is crucial for enhancing the performance of automatic speech and language processing systems, as well as fostering the development of more inclusive speech and language technologies.…
Selecting an appropriate book is crucial for fostering reading habits in children. While children exhibit varying levels of complexity when generating oral narratives, the question arises: do children's books also differ in narrative…
The differences in written text and conversational speech are substantial; previous parsers trained on treebanked text have given very poor results on spontaneous speech. For spoken language, the mismatch in style also extends to prosodic…
Naturalistic recordings capture audio in real-world environments where participants behave naturally without interference from researchers or experimental protocols. Naturalistic long-form recordings extend this concept by capturing…
Recordings gathered with child-worn devices promised to revolutionize both fundamental and applied speech sciences by allowing the effortless capture of children's naturalistic speech environment and language production. This promise hinges…
While Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs) show strong performance in many applications, their robustness is critically under-tested, especially to speech disfluency. Existing evaluations often rely on idealized inputs, overlooking…
Generative models are a popular choice for adult-to-adult voice conversion (VC) because of their efficient way of modelling unlabelled data. To this point their usefulness in producing children speech and in particular adult to child VC has…
This article describes the recognition part of a system that will be used for personalized therapy of dyslalia affecting pre scholars. Dyslalia is a speech disorder that affect pronunciation of one ore many sounds. The full system targets…
Speech is a hierarchical collection of text, prosody, emotions, dysfluencies, etc. Automatic transcription of speech that goes beyond text (words) is an underexplored problem. We focus on transcribing speech along with non-fluencies…
When translating from speech, special consideration for conversational speech phenomena such as disfluencies is necessary. Most machine translation training data consists of well-formed written texts, causing issues when translating…
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which results in altered behavior, social development, and communication patterns. In past years, autism prevalence has tripled, with 1 in 54 children now affected. Given that…
This paper describes "TLT-school" a corpus of speech utterances collected in schools of northern Italy for assessing the performance of students learning both English and German. The corpus was recorded in the years 2017 and 2018 from…