A Game with a Purpose for Automatic Detection of Children's Speech Disabilities using Limited Speech Resources
Speech therapists and researchers are becoming more concerned with the use of computer-based systems in the therapy of speech disorders. In this paper, we propose a computer-based game with a purpose (GWAP) for speech therapy of Egyptian speaking children suffering from Dyslalia. Our aim is to detect if a certain phoneme is pronounced correctly. An Egyptian Arabic speech corpus has been collected. A baseline acoustic model was trained using the Egyptian corpus. In order to benefit from existing large amounts of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) resources, MSA acoustic models were adapted with the collected Egyptian corpus. An independent testing set that covers common speech disorders has been collected for Egyptian speakers. Results show that adapted acoustic models give better recognition accuracy which could be relied on in the game and that children show more interest in playing the game than in visiting the therapist. A noticeable progress in children Dyslalia appeared with the proposed system.
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