Abstract
The goal of this study is to find out the acoustic features specific for ASD children vocalizations and speech. Three types of experiments were conducted: emotional speech, spontaneous speech, and the repetition of words. Participants in the study were children with ASD (F 84.0 according to ICD-10), biologically aged 5–14 years (n = 25 children) and typically developing (TD) children aged 5–14 years (n = 60). We compare acoustic features that are widely used in speech recognition and speech perception: pitch values, max and min values of pitch, pitch range, formants frequency, energy and duration. Formant triangles were plotted for vowels with apexes corresponding to the vowels [a], [u], and [i] in F1, F2 coordinates, and their areas were compared. For all children with ASD voice and speech is characterized by high values of pitch, abnormal spectrum, and well-marked high-frequency. Stressed vowels from the words of children (TD & ASD), spoken in discomfort, have higher values of pitch and the third (emotional) formants than spoken in a comfortable condition. ASD children showed higher values of pitch in spontaneous speech than in repetition speech. The current results are a first step toward developing speech based bio-markers for early diagnosis of ASD.
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This study is financially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (projects № 13-06-00281a, 15-06-07852a, 16-06-00024a).
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Lyakso, E., Frolova, O., Grigorev, A. (2016). A Comparison of Acoustic Features of Speech of Typically Developing Children and Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. In: Ronzhin, A., Potapova, R., Németh, G. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9811. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43958-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43958-7_4
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