Dyslexic children's reading pattern as input for ASR: Data, analysis, and pronunciation model

To realize an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that is able to recognize the Bahasa Melayu reading difficulties of dyslexic children, the language corpora has to be generated beforehand. For this purpose, data collection is performed in two public schools involving ten dyslexic children aged between seven to fourteen years old. A total of 114 Bahasa Melayu words,representing 23 consonant-vowel patterns in the spelling system of the language, served as the stimuli. The patterns range from simple to somewhat complex formations of consonant-vowel pairs in words listed in a level one primary school syllabus. An analysis was performed aimed at identifying the most frequent errors made by these dyslexic children when reading aloud, and describing the emerging reading pattern of dyslexic children in general. This paper hence provides an overview of the entire process from data collection to analysis to modeling the pronunciations of words which will serve as the active lexicon for the ASR model. This paper also highlights the challenges of data collection involving dyslexic children when they are reading aloud, and other factors that contribute to the complex nature of the data collected

Audio-visual speech in noise perception in dyslexia

Individuals with developmental dyslexia (DD) may experience, besides reading problems, other speech-related processing deficits. Here, we examined the influence of visual articulatory information (lip-read speech) at various levels of background noise on auditory word recognition in children and adults with DD. We found that children with a documented history of DD have deficits in their ability to gain benefit from lip-read information that disambiguates noise-masked speech. We show with another group of adult individuals with DD that these deficits persist into adulthood. These deficits could not be attributed to impairments in unisensory auditory word recognition. Rather, the results indicate a specific deficit in audio-visual speech processing and suggest that impaired multisensory integration might be an important aspect of DD

Predictors of Word and Text Reading Fluency of Deaf Children in Bilingual Deaf Education Programmes

Published: 25 February 2022Reading continues to be a challenging task for most deaf children. Bimodal bilingual education creates a supportive environment that stimulates deaf children’s learning through the use of sign language. However, it is still unclear how exposure to sign language might contribute to improving reading ability. Here, we investigate the relative contribution of several cognitive and linguistic variables to the development of word and text reading fluency in deaf children in bimodal bilingual education programmes. The participants of this study were 62 school-aged (8 to 10 years old at the start of the 3-year study) deaf children who took part in bilingual education (using Dutch and Sign Language of The Netherlands) and 40 age-matched hearing children. We assessed vocabulary knowledge in speech and sign, phonological awareness in speech and sign, receptive fingerspelling ability, and short-term memory at time 1 (T1). At times 2 (T2) and 3 (T3), we assessed word and text reading fluency. We found that (1) speech-based vocabulary strongly predicted word and text reading at T2 and T3, (2) fingerspelling ability was a strong predictor of word and text reading fluency at T2 and T3, (3) speech-based phonological awareness predicted word reading accuracy at T2 and T3 but did not predict text reading fluency, and (4) fingerspelling and STM predicted word reading latency at T2 while sign-based phonological awareness predicted this outcome measure at T3. These results suggest that fingerspelling may have an important function in facilitating the construction of orthographical/phonological representations of printed words for deaf children and strengthening word decoding and recognition abilitiesThis research received no external funding

Verbal Learning and Memory After Cochlear Implantation in Postlingually Deaf Adults: Some New Findings with the CVLT-II

OBJECTIVES: Despite the importance of verbal learning and memory in speech and language processing, this domain of cognitive functioning has been virtually ignored in clinical studies of hearing loss and cochlear implants in both adults and children. In this article, we report the results of two studies that used a newly developed visually based version of the California Verbal Learning Test-Second Edition (CVLT-II), a well-known normed neuropsychological measure of verbal learning and memory. DESIGN: The first study established the validity and feasibility of a computer-controlled visual version of the CVLT-II, which eliminates the effects of audibility of spoken stimuli, in groups of young normal-hearing and older normal-hearing (ONH) adults. A second study was then carried out using the visual CVLT-II format with a group of older postlingually deaf experienced cochlear implant (ECI) users (N = 25) and a group of ONH controls (N = 25) who were matched to ECI users for age, socioeconomic status, and nonverbal IQ. In addition to the visual CVLT-II, subjects provided data on demographics, hearing history, nonverbal IQ, reading fluency, vocabulary, and short-term memory span for visually presented digits. ECI participants were also tested for speech recognition in quiet. RESULTS: The ECI and ONH groups did not differ on most measures of verbal learning and memory obtained with the visual CVLT-II, but deficits were identified in ECI participants that were related to recency recall, the buildup of proactive interference, and retrieval-induced forgetting. Within the ECI group, nonverbal fluid IQ, reading fluency, and resistance to the buildup of proactive interference from the CVLT-II consistently predicted better speech recognition outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Results from this study suggest that several underlying foundational neurocognitive abilities are related to core speech perception outcomes after implantation in older adults. Implications of these findings for explaining individual differences and variability and predicting speech recognition outcomes after implantation are discussed

Automatic Speech Recognition Model for Dyslexic Children Reading in Bahasa Melayu

Dyslexic children suffer from dyslexia, a condition that profoundly impedes reading and spelling ability due to its phonological origin. Often, these children found reading and spelling difficult, exhaustive, and less interesting, and thus they are self-withdrawn from the learning process. When reading and spelling, they make many mistakes even for simple, common words that they themselves found embarrassing. However, this does not mean that they have lower IQ level than normal children. In fact, dyslexic children have average or high level of IQ and thus have a lot of potential when given the right help and support such as motivational support and suitable teaching techniques. With advancement in technology in education, computer-based applications are used to stimulate the learning process of reading and spelling. Hence, this study is an initiative towards proposing an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model to enable computer to 'listen' should incorrect reading occurs. The scope of this study focuses on modeling and recognizing single Bahasa Melayu (BM) words within the school syllabus for level one (tahap satu) dyslexic pupils of primary schools. To propose the ASR model, a reading and spelling model of dyslexic children reading in BM is first proposed, which models reading at word recognition level. To propose such model, ethnographic techniques are employed namely informal interviews and observation, in order to obtain the reading and spelling error patterns of dyslexic children. A number of ten dyslexic children, aged between 7 to 14 years old whose reading level is similar, participated in the study. These children are recruited from two public schools that offer special dyslexia classes for the children. A total of 6112 utterances are recorded in audio form resulting in a total of 6051 errors of various types. Among these, the patterns that are most frequently made by these children are of 'Substitutes vowel', 'omits consonant', 'nasals', and 'substitutes consonant'. The ASR model is proposed taking into consideration the error patterns that make lexical model a fundamental element for speech recognition. The lexical model is modeled to treat mispronunciations as alternative pronunciations or variants of target words. To that, a phoneme refinement strategy is applied aiming to increase recognition accuracy. A prototype recognizer is developed based on the proposed model for further evaluation. The evaluation is performed to evaluate the recognizer's performance in terms of accuracy, measured in word error rate (WER) and miscue detection rate (MDR) that is closely related to false alarm rate (FAR). The recognizer scores a satisfying 25% of WER and a relatively high MDR of 80.77% with 16.67% FAR

Phonological awareness in preschool age children with developmental disabilities

Reading skills are critically important for a child’s development and continued growth in school. The home and school literacy experiences of children who have developmental disabilities have been found to be qualitatively different from the experiences of their same age peers without disabilities. In addition to access to instruction, a number of intrinsic factors including cognitive ability, receptive language and expressive speech skills have been suggested as factors that may place children with developmental disabilities at a greater risk for limited development of reading skills. Currently, little is understood about how children who have developmental disabilities and may have limitations in productive speech learn to read. This study identifies key intrinsic and extrinsic factors that are related to the development of phonological awareness in 42 children between 4 years and 5 years 9 months of age with developmental disabilities and a range of speech abilities. Aims of this project were to 1- systematically assess children’s intrinsic factors of speech ability, receptive and expressive language and vocabulary, cognitive skills and phonological awareness to determine key intrinsic factors related to phonological awareness and 2- describe the extrinsic factors of home literacy experience and preschool literacy instruction provided to children. Children were found to have frequent and positive home literacy experiences. No significant correlations between speech ability and frequency of shared reading experiences were found. Parents reported low levels of preschool literacy instruction. Significant correlations were found between instruction in decoding and word recognition and children’s sound-symbol awareness. Correlations were found between the use of technology and media and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) and children’s speech ability. Positive, significant relationships were found between phonological awareness and all direct assessment measures of developmental skill, speech ability and early reading skills but were not found between phonological awareness and home or school literacy experiences. Speech ability did not predict a significant amount of variance in phonological awareness skill beyond what would be expected by cognitive development, receptive language and orthographic knowledge. This study provides important implications for practitioners and researchers alike concerning the factors related to early reading development in children with limited speech ability

Automatic transcription and phonetic labelling of dyslexic children's reading in Bahasa Melayu

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is potentially helpful for children who suffer from dyslexia. Highly phonetically similar errors of dyslexic children‟s reading affect the accuracy of ASR. Thus, this study aims to evaluate acceptable accuracy of ASR using automatic transcription and phonetic labelling of dyslexic children‟s reading in BM. For that, three objectives have been set: first to produce manual transcription and phonetic labelling; second to construct automatic transcription and phonetic labelling using forced alignment; and third to compare between accuracy using automatic transcription and phonetic labelling and manual transcription and phonetic labelling. Therefore, to accomplish these goals methods have been used including manual speech labelling and segmentation, forced alignment, Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for training, and for measure accuracy of ASR, Word Error Rate (WER) and False Alarm Rate (FAR) were used. A number of 585 speech files are used for manual transcription, forced alignment and training experiment. The recognition ASR engine using automatic transcription and phonetic labelling obtained optimum results is 76.04% with WER as low as 23.96% and FAR is 17.9%. These results are almost similar with ASR engine using manual transcription namely 76.26%, WER as low as 23.97% and FAR a 17.9%. As conclusion, the accuracy of automatic transcription and phonetic labelling is acceptable to use it for help dyslexic children learning using ASR in Bahasa Melayu (BM

Speech-in-noise perception ability can be related to auditory efferent pathway function: a comparative study in reading impaired and normal reading children Capacidade de percepção da fala no ruído pode estar relacionada à função da via auditiva eferente: estudo comparativo de crianças com dificuldade de leitura e com leitura normal

Introduction: Deficient auditory processing can cause problems with speech perception and affect the development and evolution of reading skills. The efferent auditory pathway has an important role in normal auditory system functions like speech-in-noise perception, but there is still no general agreement on this. Objective: To study the performance of the efferent auditory system in a group of children with reading impairment in comparison with normal reading and evaluation of its relationship with speech-in-noise perception. Methods: A total of 53 children between the ages of 8�12 years were selected for the study of which 27 were with reading impairment and 26 were normal reading children. Transient evoked otoacoustic emissions suppression and auditory recognition of words-in-noise test were performed for all the children. Results: The average amplitude of transient evoked otoacoustic emissions suppression showed a significant difference between the two groups in the right (p = 0.004) and in the left ear (p = 0.028). Assessment of the relationship between transient evoked otoacoustic emissions suppression and monaural auditory recognition of words-in-noise scores showed a significant moderate negative relationship only in the right ear (p = 0.034, r = �0.41) of the normal reading children. Binaural auditory recognition of words-in-noise scores were significantly correlated with the amplitude of transient evoked otoacoustic emissions suppression in the right ear (p < 0.001, r = �0.75) and in the left ear (p < 0.001, r = �0.64) of normal reading children. In the reading impaired group, ?a weaker correlation was observed between binaural auditory recognition of words-in-noise scores and transient evoked otoacoustic emissions suppression in the right (p = 0.003, r = �0.55) and in the left ear (p = 0.012, r = �0.47). Conclusions: Transient evoked otoacoustic emissions suppression pattern in the reading impaired group was different compared with normal reading children, and this difference could be related to efferent system performance. Words-in-noise scores in children with impaired reading were lower than in normal reading children. In addition, a relationship was found between transient evoked otoacoustic emissions suppression and words-in-noise scores in both normal and impaired reading children. © 2019 Associação Brasileira de Otorrinolaringologia e Cirurgia Cérvico-Facia

Neural correlates of (dys)fluent reading acquisition in typically reading and dyslexic children

Fluent reading requires both fast recognition of written text and an automatic link to the speech sounds that these letters represent. This thesis investigates brain mechanisms underlying both processes in nine year old typically reading and dyslexic children. By measuring electrical brain responses we showed that impairments in the neural coupling of letters and speech sounds relate to the severity of reading dysfluency in dyslexic children. Moreover, results of a dyslexia training study demonstrated that letter-speech sound training leads to a moderate improvement in reading fluency, and that the level of improvement relates to the severity of the underlying deficit

Eyetracking of Coarticulatory Cue Responses in Children and Adults

Studies examining sensitivity to coarticulatory cues during spoken word recognition have typically examined children and adults separately. The present thesis compared sensitivity to coarticulatory cues in school-aged children and adults using eyetracking. Children and adults listened to words containing congruent and incongruent coarticulatory cues while looking at a two-picture display. Contrary to theories positing weakened attention to phonetic detail in children, we observed equal or greater sensitivity to coarticulatory cues in children compared to adults. This effect was related to predictors of reading and language proficiency, and was also modulated by phoneme contrasts such that children were overly sensitive to more salient coarticulatory cues. These findings suggest that children are more sensitive to phonetic detail in speech than adults, and the phonological skills underlying this sensitivity are related to individual differences in reading and language ability