Abstract
This paper reports findings from an analysis of errors made by an automatic speech recogniser trained and tested with 3-10-year-old European Portuguese children’s speech. We expected and were able to identify frequent pronunciation error patterns in the children’s speech. Furthermore, we were able to correlate some of these pronunciation error patterns and automatic speech recognition errors. The findings reported in this paper are of phonetic interest but will also be useful for improving the performance of automatic speech recognisers aimed at children representing the target population of the study.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Gerosa, M., Giuliani, D., Narayanan, S., Potamianos, A.: A Review of ASR Technologies for Children’s Speech. In: Workshop on Child, Computer and Interaction, Cambridge, MA (2009)
Russell, M., D’Arcy, S.: Challenges for Computer Recognition of Children’s Speech. In: Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education, Farmington, PA (2007)
Potamianos, A., Narayanan, S.: Robust Recognition of Children’s Speech. IEEE Speech Audio Process 11(6), 603–615 (2003)
Wilpon, J.G., Jacobsen, C.N.: A Study of Speech Recognition for Children and Elderly. In: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Atlanta, GA, pp. 349–352 (1996)
Elenius, D., Blomberg, M.: Adaptation and Normalization Experiments in Speech Recognition for 4 to 8 Year Old Children. In: Interspeech, Lisbon (2005)
Gerosa, M., Giuliani, D., Brugnara, F.: Speaker Adaptive Acoustic Modeling with Mixture of Adult and Children’s Speech. In: Interspeech, Lisbon (2005)
Gerosa, M., Giuliani, D., Brugnara, F.: Acoustic Variability and Automatic Recognition of Children’s Speech. Speech Commun. 49(10-11), 847–860 (2007)
Huber, J.E., Stathopoulos, E.T., Curione, G.M., Ash, T.A., Johnson, K.: Formants of Children, Women and Men: The Effects of Vocal Intensity Variation. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106(3), 1532–1542 (1999)
Lee, S., Potamianos, A., Narayanan, S.: Acoustics of Children’s Speech: Developmental Changes of Temporal and Spectral Parameters. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 10, 1455–1468 (1999)
Narayanan, S., Potamianos, A.: Creating Conversational Interfaces for Children. IEEE Speech Audio Process. 10(2), 65–78 (2002)
Eguchi, S., Hirsh, I.J.: Development of Speech Sounds in Children. Acta Otolaryngol. Suppl. 257, 1–51 (1969)
Bowen, C.: Children’s Speech Sound Disorders. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford (2009)
Grunwell, P.: Clinical Phonology, 2nd edn. Wiliams & Wilkins, Baltimore (1987)
Miccio, A.W., Scarpino, S.E.: Phonological Analysis, Phonological Processes. In: Ball, M.J., Perkins, M.R., Muller, N., Howard, S. (eds.) The Handbook of Clinical Linguistics. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden (2008)
Candeias, S., Perdigão, F.: Syllable Structure in Dysfunctional Portuguese Children Speech. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 24(11), 883–889 (2010)
Freitas, M.J.: Acquisition in European Portuguese: Resources and Linguistic Results. Project funded by FCT: PTDC/LIN/68024/2006, Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (CLUL) (2006)
Vigário, M.: Development of Prosodic Structure and Intonation (DEPE). Project funded by FCT: PTDC/CLELIN/108722/2008, Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (CLUL) (2008)
Costa, J.: Syntactic Dependencies from 3 to 10. Project funded by FCT: PTDC/CLELIN/099802/2008, Centro de Linguística da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (CLUNL) (2008)
Freitas, M.J., Gonçalves, A., Duarte, I.: Avaliação da Consciência Linguística: Aspectos fonológicos e sintácticos do Português. Ed. Colibri, Lisbon (2011)
Faria, M.I.H.: Reading Comprehension. Word, Sentence and Text processing. Project funded by FCT: PTDC/LIN/67854/2006, Centro de Linguística da Universidade (2006)
Frota, S., Correia, S., Severino, C., Cruz, M., Vigário, M., Cortês, S.: PLEX5 A Production Lexicon of Child Speech for European Portuguese / Um léxico infantil para o Português Europeu. Laboratório de Fonética CLUL/FLUL, Lisbon (2012)
Guerreiro, H., Frota, S.: Os processos fonológicos na fala da criança de cinco anos: tipologia e frequência, vol. 3. Instituto de Ciências da Saúde, UCP (2010)
Almeida, L., Costa, T., Freitas, M.J.: Estas portas e janelas: O caso das sibilantes na aquisição do português europeu. In: Conferência XXV Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, Porto (2010)
Hämäläinen, A., Miguel Pinto, F., Rodrigues, S., Júdice, A., Morgado Silva, S., Calado, A., Sales Dias, M.: A Multimodal Educational Game for 3-10-year-old Children: Collecting and Automatically Recognising European Portuguese Children’s Speech. In: Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education, Grenoble (2013)
Young, S., Evermann, G., Hain, T., Kershaw, D., Moore, G., Odell, J., Ollason, D., Povey, D., Valtchev, V., Woodland, P.: The HTK Book (for HTK Version 3.2.1). Cambridge University, Cambridge (2002)
Microsoft Speech Platform Runtime (Version 11), http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27225 (accessed March 25, 2013)
Wells, J.C.: Portuguese (1997), http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/portug.htm
Meinedo, H., Abad, A., Pellegrini, T., Neto, J., Trancoso, I.: The L2F Broadcast News Speech Recognition System. In: FALA, Vigo, pp. 93–96 (2010)
Vieru, B., Boula de Mareüil, P., Adda-Decker, M.: Characterisation and Identification of Non-Native French Accents. Speech Commun. 53(3), 292–310 (2011)
Boersma, P.: Praat, a System for Doing Phonetics by Computer. Glot International 5(9/10), 341–345 (2001)
Pellegrini, T., Hämäläinen, A., Boula de Mareüil, P., Tjalve, M., Trancoso, I., Candeias, S., Sales Dias, M., Braga, D.: A Corpus-Based Study of Elderly and Young Speakers of European Portuguese: Acoustic Correlates and Their Impact on Speech Recognition Performance. Interspeech, Lyon (2013)
Mateus, M.H., d’Andrade, E.: The Phonology of Portuguese. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2000)
Barbosa, J.M.: Introdução ao Estudo da Fonologia e Morfologia do Português. Almedina, Coimbra (1994)
Veiga, A., Celorico, D., Proença, J., Candeias, S., Perdigão, F.: Prosodic and Phonetic Features for Speaking Styles Classification and Detection. In: Toledano, D.T., Ortega, A., Teixeira, A., Gonzalez-Rodriguez, J., Hernandez-Gomez, L., San-Segundo, R., Ramos, D. (eds.) IberSPEECH 2012. CCIS, vol. 328, pp. 89–98. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Cincarek, T., Shindo, I., Toda, T., Saruwatari, H., Shikano, K.: Development of Preschool Children Subsystem for ASR and Q&A in a Real-Environment Speech-Oriented Guidance Task. In: Interspeech, Antwerp (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hämäläinen, A. et al. (2014). Automatically Recognising European Portuguese Children’s Speech. In: Baptista, J., Mamede, N., Candeias, S., Paraboni, I., Pardo, T.A.S., Volpe Nunes, M.d.G. (eds) Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8775. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09761-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09761-9_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09760-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09761-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)