Mispronunciation Detection in Children's Reading of Sentences

This work proposes an approach to automatically parse children’s reading of sentences by detecting word pronunciations and extra content, and to classify words as correctly or incorrectly pronounced. This approach can be directly helpful for automatic assessment of reading level or for automatic reading tutors, where a correct reading must be identified. We propose a first segmentation stage to locate candidate word pronunciations based on allowing repetitions and false starts of a word’s syllables. A decoding grammar based solely on syllables allows silence to appear during a word pronunciation. At a second stage, word candidates are classified as mispronounced or not. The feature that best classifies mispronunciations is found to be the log-likelihood ratio between a free phone loop and a word spotting model in the very close vicinity of the candidate segmentation. Additional features are combined in multi-feature models to further improve classification, including: normalizations of the log-likelihood ratio, derivations from phone likelihoods, and Levenshtein distances between the correct pronunciation and recognized phonemes through two phoneme recognition approaches. Results show that most extra events were detected (close to 2% word error rate achieved) and that using automatic segmentation for mispronunciation classification approaches the performance of manual segmentation. Although the log-likelihood ratio from a spotting approach is already a good metric to classify word pronunciations, the combination of additional features provides a relative reduction of the miss rate of 18% (from 34.03% to 27.79% using manual segmentation and from 35.58% to 29.35% using automatic segmentation, at constant 5% false alarm rate).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Speech and language difficulties in children with and without a family history of dyslexia

Comorbidity between SLI and dyslexia is well documented. Researchers have variously argued that dyslexia is a separate disorder from SLI, or that children with dyslexia show a subset of the difficulties shown in SLI. This study examines these hypotheses by assessing whether family history of dyslexia and speech and language difficulties are separable risk factors for literacy difficulties. Forty-six children with a family risk of dyslexia (FRD) and 36 children receiving speech therapy (SLT) were compared to 128 typically developing children. A substantial number (41.3%) of the children with FRD had received SLT. The nature of their difficulties did not differ in severity or form from those shown by the other children in SLT. However, both SLT and FRD were independent risk factors in predicting reading difficulties both concurrently and 6 months later. It is argued that the results are best explained in terms of Pennington's (2006) multiple deficits model

Design and analysis of a database to evaluate children’s reading aloud performance

To evaluate the reading performance of children, human assessment is usually involved, where a teacher or tutor has to take time to individually estimate the performance in terms of fluency (speed, accuracy and expression). Automatic estimation of reading ability can be an important alternative or complement to the usual methods, and can improve other applications such as e-learning. Techniques must be developed to analyse audio recordings of read utterances by children and detect the deviations from the intended correct reading i.e. disfluencies. For that goal, a database of 284 European Portuguese children from 6 to 10 years old (1st–4th grades) reading aloud amounting to 20 h was collected in private and public Portuguese schools. This paper describes the design of the reading tasks as well as the data collection procedure. The presence of different types of disfluencies is analysed as well as reading performance compared to known curricular goals.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Sensitivity to speech rhythm explains individual differences in reading ability independently of phonological awareness

This study considered whether sensitivity to speech rhythm can predict concurrent variance in reading attainment after individual differences in age, vocabulary and phonological awareness have been controlled. Five to six-year-old English-speaking children completed a battery of phonological processing assessments and reading assessments, along with a simple word stress manipulation task. The results showed that performance on the stress manipulation measure predicted a significant amount of variance in reading attainment after age, vocabulary, and phonological processing had been taken into account. These results suggest that stress sensitivity is an important, yet neglected aspect of English-speaking children?s phonological representations, which needs to be incorporated into theoretical accounts of reading development

Training mispronunciation correction and word meanings improves children’s ability to learn to read words

Previous research has suggested that learning to read irregular words depends upon knowledge of a word’s meaning and the ability to correct imperfect decoding attempts by reference to the known pronunciations of a word. In an experimental training study, 84 children ages 5–7 years were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group. Children in the intervention group participated in a 4-week programme in which they were taught to correct mispronunciations of spoken words as well as being taught the meanings of those words. Children in the control group received no additional teaching. The intervention group made significant gains in their ability to correct mispronunciations and to read and define the taught words; these gains also generalised to a comparable set of untaught control words. Children can be taught to correct errors in the pronunciation of irregular words, and this may produce generalised effects on learning to read

The influence of long-term exposure to dialect variation on representation specificity and word learning in toddlers.

Until very recently language development research classified the language learner as belonging to one of two discrete groups – monolingual or bilingual. This thesis explores the hypothesis that this is an insufficient description of language input and that there are sub-groups within the monolingual category based on the phonological variability of their exposure that could be considered akin to that of bilingual toddlers. For some monolingual toddlers, classified as monodialectal, their language exposure is generally consistent, because both of their parents speak the dialect of the local area. Yet for other toddlers, classified as multidialectal, the language environment is more variable, because at least one of their parents speaks with a dialect that differs from the local area. It is considered that by testing this group of multidialectal toddlers it will be possible to explore the effect of variability on language development and how increased variability in the bilingual linguistic environment might be influencing aspects of language development. This thesis approaches the influence of variability from three areas of interest: phonetic specificity of familiar words using a mispronunciation paradigm (Experiments 1 and 2), target recognition of naturally occurring pronunciation alternatives (Experiments 3 and 4) and use of the Mutual Exclusivity strategy in novel word learning (Experiment 5). Results show that there are differences between the two dialect groups (monodialectal and multidialectal) in a mispronunciation detection task but that toddlers perform similarly with naturally occurring pronunciation alternatives and in their application of the Mutual Exclusivity strategy. This programme of work highlights that there is an influence of linguistic variability on aspects of language development, justifying the parallel between bilingualism and multidialectalism

Automatically Recognising European Portuguese Children's Speech

International audienceThis 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

Metalinguistic awareness in literate and illiterate children and adults: a psycholinguistic study

One of the major goals of psycholinguistic research is to be able to account for those mental operations which enable native speakers not only to perform the basic linguistic capacities such as comprehending and producing an illimited number of utterances, but also to exercise such metalinguistic abilities as to judge utterances, segment words, identify sounds and detect ambiguities. The primary concern of this thesis was to elucidate the processes underlying certain aspects of metalinguistic awareness and to trace their relationship to advances in maturation and acquisition of literacy. The guiding principle has been to determine how much of what has been considered normal cognitive development is in fact an age-bound developmental phenomenon, or to what extent it reflects the result of experiences associated with the degree and extent of literacy. The need for this is apparent on examining previous research which, as we demonstrate, has confounded such theoretically important variables as Age, Literacy and peculiarities of the native language. The aim of the methodology employed here was to deconf ound such variables and add more insight as to the nature of metalinguistic abilities. First, by employing literate and illiterate children and adults, the design optimizes the likelihood of tapping a precise relationship between maturation, literacy and metalinguistic awareness. Second, by using native speakers of Arabic, the general design offers the opportunity to add insight from language yet another typologically different from English in which most previous research was conducted. Third, by employing more than one type of linguistic measure for the same population, the design also hopes to answer one empirical question, namely',, whether metalinguistic awareness can be conceptualised as either multidimensional or unitary in nature. The Subjects who participated in the study were 120 Moroccan Arabic speaking literate and illiterate children and adults drawn from a relatively homogeneous socio-economic background. A total of seven experiments -- some with subtasks -- were used. Six chapters make up the study. In Chapter 1 we have tried to provide an introduction to the theoretical issues which we think are of central importance to the topic under investigation. Because our approach is essentially psycholinguistic, Chapter 2 describes and discusses the methodology employed to gather the necessary data for the study. It is also concerned with the procedures used to evaluate these data. Chapters 3,4, and 5 form the main bulk of the research. Using various experiments, they examine the extent to which Ss deploy their metalinguistic knowledge in the process of attending to and manipulating the following linguistic units: (i) words (Chapter 3); (ii) syllables (Chapter 4); (iii) segments (Chapter 5). Typically, each one of these chapters considers various hypotheses and research questions which concern the specific linguistic unit. Finally, Chapter 6 draws general conclusions from the general study and addresses some implications for linguistic theory, psycholinguistic research and, although not extensively, education research

Overcoming segmental difficulties in English pronunciation in Spanish 3-ESO bilingual students through the use of SpeechAce

The aim of this study is to account for the main problems with which secondary school students are faced in terms of English pronunciation, and to look into the effectiveness of ‘SpeechAce’ as a tool for English phoneme pronunciation improvement. Specifically, the data obtained were evaluated considering the challenging English phonemes, the mispronunciation rate of each English phoneme prior to the use of ‘SpeechAce’, and the improvement rate shown upon its use. The results obtained show that both consonant and vowel sounds present similar mispronunciation rates before the use of ‘SpeechAce’ as well as similar improvement rates after its use. Thereby, ‘SpeechAce’ has proved to be a useful tool to overcome secondary school students’ segmental difficulties in English pronunciation.El objetivo de este Trabajo de Fin de Máster consiste en explicar los principales problemas de pronunciación inglesa que presentan los alumnos de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria e investigar la efectividad de ‘SpeechAce’ como herramienta para solventarlos. En concreto, se han analizado los fonemas ingleses más complicados, la tasa de pronunciación incorrecta de cada fonema antes de utilizar ‘SpeechAce’, y la tasa de mejora después de su uso. En términos generales, los resultados del estudio demuestran que los sonidos consonánticos y vocálicos presentan tasas similares de pronunciación incorrecta antes del uso de ‘SpeechAce’, además de tasas de mejora semejantes después de su uso. Por lo tanto, ‘SpeechAce’ ha demostrado ser una herramienta de utilidad a la hora de solucionar los problemas relacionados con los elementos segmentales de la pronunciación inglesa.Departamento de Filología InglesaMáster en Profesor de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria y Bachillerato, Formación Profesional y Enseñanzas de Idioma