TY - JOUR
T1 - Automatic intonation recognition for the prosodic assessment of language-impaired children
AU - Ringeval, Fabien
AU - Demouy, Julie
AU - Szaszák, György
AU - Chetouani, Mohamed
AU - Robel, Laurence
AU - Xavier, Jean
AU - Cohen, David
AU - Plaza, Monique
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received April 17, 2010; revised August 15, 2010 and October 15, 2010; accepted October 18, 2010. Date of publication October 28, 2010; date of current version May 13, 2011. This work was supported in part by the French Ministry of Research and Superior Teaching and by the Hubert–Curien partnership between France (EGIDE www.egide.asso.fr) and Hungary (TéT, OMFB-00364/2008). The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Renato De Mori.
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - This study presents a preliminary investigation into the automatic assessment of language-impaired children's (LIC) prosodic skills in one grammatical aspect: sentence modalities. Three types of language impairments were studied: autism disorder (AD), pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), and specific language impairment (SLI). A control group of typically developing (TD) children that was both age and gender matched with LIC was used for the analysis. All of the children were asked to imitate sentences that provided different types of intonation (e.g., descending and rising contours). An automatic system was then used to assess LIC's prosodic skills by comparing the intonation recognition scores with those obtained by the control group. The results showed that all LIC have difficulties in reproducing intonation contours because they achieved significantly lower recognition scores than TD children on almost all studied intonations (p <0.05). Regarding the "Rising" intonation, only SLI children had high recognition scores similar to TD children, which suggests a more pronounced pragmatic impairment in AD and PDD-NOS children. The automatic approach used in this study to assess LIC's prosodic skills confirms the clinical descriptions of the subjects' communication impairments.
AB - This study presents a preliminary investigation into the automatic assessment of language-impaired children's (LIC) prosodic skills in one grammatical aspect: sentence modalities. Three types of language impairments were studied: autism disorder (AD), pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), and specific language impairment (SLI). A control group of typically developing (TD) children that was both age and gender matched with LIC was used for the analysis. All of the children were asked to imitate sentences that provided different types of intonation (e.g., descending and rising contours). An automatic system was then used to assess LIC's prosodic skills by comparing the intonation recognition scores with those obtained by the control group. The results showed that all LIC have difficulties in reproducing intonation contours because they achieved significantly lower recognition scores than TD children on almost all studied intonations (p <0.05). Regarding the "Rising" intonation, only SLI children had high recognition scores similar to TD children, which suggests a more pronounced pragmatic impairment in AD and PDD-NOS children. The automatic approach used in this study to assess LIC's prosodic skills confirms the clinical descriptions of the subjects' communication impairments.
KW - Automatic intonation recognition
KW - prosodic skills assessment
KW - social communication impairments
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79956290068&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TASL.2010.2090147
DO - 10.1109/TASL.2010.2090147
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79956290068
SN - 1558-7916
VL - 19
SP - 1328
EP - 1342
JO - IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
JF - IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
IS - 5
M1 - 5613153
ER -