2021/06/16 by Si-Ioi Ng, Ng, Si-Ioi, Cymie Wing-Yee Ng +5
Computer Science · Psychology · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and Audio Processing #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.08536
openalex publication_date 2021/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Speech sound disorder (SSD) refers to a type of developmental disorder in young children who encounter persistent difficulties in producing certain speech sounds at the expected age. Consonant errors are the major indicator of SSD in clinical assessment. Previous studies on automatic assessment of SSD revealed that detection of speech errors concerning short and transitory consonants is less satisfactory. This paper investigates a neural network based approach to detecting consonant errors in disordered speech using consonant-vowel (CV) diphone segment in comparison to using consonant monophone segment. The underlying assumption is that the vowel part of a CV segment carries important information of co-articulation from the consonant. Speech embeddings are extracted from CV segments by a recurrent neural network model. The similarity scores between the embeddings of the test segment and the reference segments are computed to determine if the test segment is the expected consonant or not. Experimental results show that using CV segments achieves improved performance on detecting speech errors concerning those "difficult" consonants reported in the previous studies.