Classifying Rhoticity of /r/ in Speech Sound Disorder using Age-and-Sex Normalized Formants

Abstract

Mispronunciation detection tools could increase treatment access for speech sound disorders impacting, e.g., /r/. We show age-and-sex normalized formant estimation outperforms cepstral representation for detection of fully rhotic vs. derhotic /r/ in the PERCEPT-R Corpus. Gated recurrent neural networks trained on this feature set achieve a mean test participant-specific F1-score =.81 (σx=.10, med = .83, n = 48), with post hoc modeling showing no significant effect of child age or sex.

To appear in Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2023

References in corpus (3)

• UltraSuite: A Repository of Ultrasound and Acoustic Data from Child Speech Therapy Sessions
• Exploiting ultrasound tongue imaging for the automatic detection of speech articulation errors
• Prospective Validation of Motor-Based Intervention with Automated Mispronunciation Detection of Rhotics in Residual Speech Sound Disorders