Automatic assessment of prosodic quality in down syndrome : analysis of the impact of speaker heterogeneity
Corrales Astorgano, Mario (Universidad de Valladolid. Departamento de Informática)
Martínez Castilla, Pastora (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Espanya))
Escudero, David (Universidad de Valladolid. Departamento de Informática)
Aguilar, Lourdes (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Espanyola)
González-Ferreras, César (Universidad de Valladolid. Departamento de Informática)
Cardeñoso Payo, Valentín (Universidad de Valladolid. Departamento de Informática)

Date:	2019
Abstract:	Prosody is a fundamental speech element responsible for communicative functions such as intonation, accent and phrasing, and prosodic impairments of individuals with intellectual disabilities reduce their communication skills. Yet, technological resources have paid little attention to prosody. This study aims to develop an automatic classifier to predict the prosodic quality of utterances produced by individuals with Down syndrome, and to analyse how inter-individual heterogeneity affects assessment results. A therapist and an expert in prosody judged the prosodic appropriateness of a corpus of Down syndrome' utterances collected through a video game. The judgments of the expert were used to train an automatic classifier that predicts prosodic quality by using a set of fundamental frequency, duration and intensity features. The classifier accuracy was 79. 3% and its true positive rate 89. 9%. We analyzed how informative each of the features was for the assessment and studied relationships between participants' developmental level and results: interspeaker variability conditioned the relative weight of prosodic features for automatic classification and participants' developmental level was related to the prosodic quality of their productions. Therefore, since speaker variability is an intrinsic feature of individuals with Down syndrome, it should be considered to attain an effective automatic prosodic assessment system.
Grants:	Agencia Estatal de Investigación TIN2017-88858-C2-1-R
Note:	The activities of Down syndrome speech analysis continue (1/2018-12/2020) in the project funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades and the European Regional Development Fund FEDER (TIN2017-88858-C2-1-R) and in the project funded by Junta de Castilla y León (VA050G18). Part of this work was funded by BBVA Foundation (2015-2017) in the framework of the project PRADIA: Pragmatics and prosody: the graphic adventure game.
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Published in:	Applied sciences (Basel), Vol. 9, núm. 7 (january 2019) , p. 1440, ISSN 2076-3417

DOI: 10.3390/app9071440

17 p, 389.2 KB

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Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Arts and Humanities > Center for Theoretical Linguistics (CLT)
Articles > Research articles
Articles > Published articles