Specific Language Impairments and Possibilities of Classification and Detection from Children's Speech

Many young children have speech disorders. My research focused on one such disorder, known as specific language impairment or developmental dysphasia. A major problem in treating this disorder is the fact that specific language impairment is detected in children at a relatively late age. For successful speech therapy, early diagnosis is critical. I present two different approaches to this issue using a very simple test that I have devised for diagnosing this disorder. In this thesis, I describe a new method for detecting specific language impairment based on the number of pronunciation errors in utterances. An advantage of this method is its simplicity; anyone can use it, including parents. The second method is based on the acoustic features of the speech signal. An advantage of this method is that it could be used to develop an automatic detection system. KeyKatedra teorie obvod

Classification and Detection of Specific Language Impairments in Children Based on their Speech Skills

The ability to use the spoken language is one of the most important characteristics in child development. Speech is difficult to replace in real life, although there are several other options for communication. Inabilities to communicate with speech skills can isolate children from society, especially children with specific language impairments. This research study focused on a specific disorder, known as specific language impairment (SLI); in the Czech language, it is specifically known as developmental dysphasia (DD). One major problem is that this disorder is detected at a relatively late age. Early diagnosis is critical for successful speech therapy in children. The current chapter presents several different approaches to solve this issue, including a simple test for detecting this disorder. One approach involves the use of an original iPad application for detecting SLI based on the number of pronunciation errors in utterances. One advantage of this method is its simplicity; anyone can use it, including parents

Regionalized tissue fluidization is required for epithelial gap closure during insect gastrulation

Many animal embryos pull and close an epithelial sheet around the ellipsoidal egg surface during a gastrulation process known as epiboly. The ovoidal geometry dictates that the epithelial sheet first expands and subsequently compacts. Moreover, the spreading epithelium is mechanically stressed and this stress needs to be released. Here we show that during extraembryonic tissue (serosa) epiboly in the insect Tribolium castaneum, the non-proliferative serosa becomes regionalized into a solid-like dorsal region with larger non-rearranging cells, and a more fluid-like ventral region surrounding the leading edge with smaller cells undergoing intercalations. Our results suggest that a heterogeneous actomyosin cable contributes to the fluidization of the leading edge by driving sequential eviction and intercalation of individual cells away from the serosa margin. Since this developmental solution utilized during epiboly resembles the mechanism of wound healing, we propose actomyosin cable-driven local tissue fluidization as a conserved morphogenetic module for closure of epithelial gaps

Speech databases of typical children and children with SLI

<div>Our Laboratory of Artificial Neural Network Applications (LANNA) in the Czech Technical University in Prague (head of the laboratory is professor Jana Tučková) collaborates on a project with the Department of Paediatric Neurology, 2nd Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Prague and with the Motol University Hospital (head of clinic is professor Vladimír Komárek), which focuses on the study of children with SLI.</div><div><br></div>The speech database contains two subgroups of recordings of children's speech from different types of speakers. The first subgroup (healthy) consists of recordings of children without speech disorders; the second subgroup (patients) consists of recordings of children with SLI. These children have different degrees of severity (1 – mild, 2 – moderate, and 3 – severe). The speech therapists and specialists from Motol Hospital decided upon this classification. The children’s speech was recorded in the period 2003-2013. These databases were commonly created in a schoolroom or a speech therapist’s consulting room, in the presence of surrounding background noise. This situation simulates the natural environment in which the children live, and is important for capturing the normal behavior of children. The database of healthy children’s speech was created as a referential database for the computer processing of children’s speech. It was recorded on the SONY digital Dictaphone (sampling frequency, fs = 16 kHz, 16-bit resolution in stereo mode in the standardized wav format) and on the MD SONY MZ-N710 (sampling frequency, fs = 44.1 kHz, 16-bit resolution in stereo mode in the standardized wav format). The corpus was recorded in the natural environment of a schoolroom and in a clinic. This subgroup contains a total of 44 native Czech participants (15 boys, 29 girls) aged 4 to 12 years, and was recorded during the period 2003–2005. The database of children with SLI was recorded in a private speech therapist’s office. The children’s speech is captured by means of a SHURE lapel microphone using the solution by the company AVID (MBox – USB AD/DA converter and ProTools LE software) on an Apple laptop (iBook G4). The sound recordings are saved in the standardized wav format. The sampling frequency is set to 44.1 kHz with 16-bit resolution in mono mode. This subgroup contains a total of 54 native Czech participants (35 boys, 19 girls) aged 6 to 12 years, and was recorded during the period 2009–2013. This package contains wav data sets for development and testing methods for detection children with SLI.<div><br></div><div>Software pack:</div><div>FORANA - was developed the original software FORANA for formants analysis. It is based on the MATLAB programming environment. The development of this software was mainly driven by the need to have the ability to complete formant analysis correctly and full automation of the process of extracting formants from the recorded speech signals. Development of this application is still running. Software was developed in the LANNA at CTU FEE in Prague.</div><div><br></div><div>LABELING - the program LABELING is used for segmentation of the speech signal. It is a part of SOMLab program system. Software was developed in the LANNA at CTU FEE in Prague.</div><div><br></div><div>PRAAT - is an acoustic analysis software. The Praat program was created by Paul Boersma and David Weenink of the Institute of Phonetics Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. Home page:<a href="http://www.praat.org/" target="_blank">http://www.praat.org</a> or <a href="http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/" target="_blank">http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/</a>.</div><div><br></div><div>openSMILE - The openSMILE feature extration tool enables you to extract large audio feature spaces in realtime. It combines features from Music Information Retrieval and Speech Processing. SMILE is an acronym for<i>Speech & Music Interpretation by Large-space Extraction.</i> It is written in C++ and is available as both a standalone commandline executable as well as a dynamic library. The main features of openSMILE are its capability of on-line incremental processing and its modularity. Feature extractor components can be freely interconnected to create new and custom features, all via a simple configuration file. New components can be added to openSMILE via an easy binary plugin interface and a comprehensive API. Citing: Florian Eyben, Martin Wöllmer, Björn Schuller: "openSMILE - The Munich Versatile and Fast Open-Source Audio Feature Extractor", <i>In Proc. ACM Multimedia (MM), ACM, Florence, Italy</i>, ACM, ISBN 978-1-60558-933-6, pp. 1459-1462, October 2010. doi:<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1873951.1874246" target="_blank">10.1145/1873951.1874246</a></div

Speech Databases of Typical Children and Children with SLI.

The extent of research on children's speech in general and on disordered speech specifically is very limited. In this article, we describe the process of creating databases of children's speech and the possibilities for using such databases, which have been created by the LANNA research group in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague. These databases have been principally compiled for medical research but also for use in other areas, such as linguistics. Two databases were recorded: one for healthy children's speech (recorded in kindergarten and in the first level of elementary school) and the other for pathological speech of children with a Specific Language Impairment (recorded at a surgery of speech and language therapists and at the hospital). Both databases were sub-divided according to specific demands of medical research. Their utilization can be exoteric, specifically for linguistic research and pedagogical use as well as for studies of speech-signal processing

Stability of galvanomagnetic properties of CdTe in the range 30-100%

The thermal stability of p-type CdTe crystals by using conductivity and Hall-effect measurements have been studied at room and slightly increased temperatures. Different types of thermal relaxation were observed for two p-type samples, which differed in the character and in the rate of the relaxation

Common outputs of our analyses in the web tool.

<p>This figure shows the results from all analyses (Formants, Tests of Utterance, Extracting Features and Artificial Neural Networks); 2a) The panel shows all graphs; 2b) This section contains all the calculated values in the tables.</p

Comparison to different vocalic triangles.

<p>Blue is represents isolated vowels and orange represents vowels from the utterance “varicolored”. The color red represents vowels that are in the wrong place (graphs on the right side).</p