Related papers: Best Practices and Considerations for Child Speech…
Children's speech recognition is a vital, yet largely overlooked domain when building inclusive speech technologies. The major challenge impeding progress in this domain is the lack of adequate child speech corpora; however, recent advances…
This paper describes the design and development of CUCHILD, a large-scale Cantonese corpus of child speech. The corpus contains spoken words collected from 1,986 child speakers aged from 3 to 6 years old. The speech materials include 130…
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.…
Disfluencies are prevalent in spontaneous speech, as shown in many studies of adult speech. Less is understood about children's speech, especially in pre-school children who are still developing their language skills. We present a novel…
Sex classification of children's voices allows for an investigation of the development of secondary sex characteristics which has been a key interest in the field of speech analysis. This research investigated a broad range of acoustic…
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…
The report presents the process of planning, designing and the development of a database of spoken children's speech whose native language is Bulgarian. The proposed model is designed for children between the age of 4 and 6 without speech…
Children are one of the most under-represented groups in speech technologies, as well as one of the most vulnerable in terms of privacy. Despite this, anonymization techniques targeting this population have received little attention. In…
How do adults understand children's speech? Children's productions over the course of language development often bear little resemblance to typical adult pronunciations, yet caregivers nonetheless reliably recover meaning from them. Here,…
Automated Speech Recognition shows superhuman performance for adult English speech on a range of benchmarks, but disappoints when fed children's speech. This has long sat in the way of child-robot interaction. Recent evolutions in…
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…
Despite the growing demand for digital therapeutics for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), there is currently no speech corpus available for Korean children with ASD. This paper introduces a speech corpus specifically designed…
A balanced speech corpus is the basic need for any speech processing task. In this report we describe our effort on development of Assamese speech corpus. We mainly focused on some issues and challenges faced during development of the…
Use of speech models for automatic speech processing tasks can improve efficiency in the screening, analysis, diagnosis and treatment in medicine and psychiatry. However, the performance of pre-processing speech tasks like segmentation and…
Dementia affects cognitive functions of adults, including memory, language, and behaviour. Standard diagnostic biomarkers such as MRI are costly, whilst neuropsychological tests suffer from sensitivity issues in detecting dementia onset.…
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…
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…
People spend a substantial portion of their lives engaged in conversation, and yet our scientific understanding of conversation is still in its infancy. In this report we advance an interdisciplinary science of conversation, with findings…
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…
Automatic inference of important paralinguistic information such as age from speech is an important area of research with numerous spoken language technology based applications. Speaker age estimation has applications in enabling…