Skip to main content

The CNG Corpus of European Portuguese Children’s Speech

  • Conference paper
Text, Speech, and Dialogue (TSD 2013)

Abstract

Speech recognisers trained with adults’ speech do not work well with children’s speech because of the inherent acoustic and linguistic differences in the speech of these two populations. To develop speech-driven applications capable of successfully recognising children’s speech, a sufficient amount of children’s speech is needed for training acoustic models from scratch or for adapting acoustic models trained with adults’ speech. However, the availability of suitable children’s speech corpora is still limited, especially in the case of less-spoken languages. This paper describes the design, collection, transcription and annotation of a 21-hour corpus of prompted European Portuguese children’s speech collected from 510 children aged 3-10. Before the development of this corpus, European Portuguese children’s speech data have not been available at all for parts of this age range.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Gerosa, M., Giuliani, D., Narayanan, S., Potamianos, A.: A Review of ASR Technologies for Children’s Speech. In: Proc. Workshop on Child, Computer and Interaction, Cambridge, MA (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Russell, M., D’Arcy, S.: Challenges for Computer Recognition of Children’s Speech. In: Proc. SLaTE 2007, Farmington, PA (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Potamianos, A., Narayanan, S.: Robust Recognition of Children’s Speech. IEEE Speech Audio Process. 11(6), 603–615 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Wilpon, J.G., Jacobsen, C.N.: A Study of Speech Recognition for Children and the Elderly. In: Proc. ICASSP, Atlanta, GA (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Elenius, D., Blomberg, M.: Adaptation and Normalization Experiments in Speech Recognition for 4 to 8 Year Old Children. In: Proc. Interspeech, Lisbon (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Gerosa, M., Giuliani, D., Brugnara, F.: Speaker Adaptive Acoustic Modeling with Mixture of Adult and Children’s Speech. In: Proc. Interspeech, Lisbon (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Narayanan, S., Potamianos, A.: Creating Conversational Interfaces for Children. IEEE Speech Audio Process. 10(2), 65–78 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Gerosa, M., Giuliani, D., Brugnara, F.: Acoustic Variability and Automatic Recognition of Children’s Speech. Speech Commun. 49(10-11), 847–860 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Huber, J.E., Stathopoulos, E.T., Curione, G.M., Ash, T.A., Johnson, K.: Formants of Children, Women and Men: The Effects of Vocal Intensity Variation. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106(3), 1532–1542 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Lee, S., Potamianos, A., Narayanan, S.: Acoustics of Children’s Speech: Developmental Changes of Temporal and Spectral Parameters. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 10, 1455–1468 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Eguchi, S., Hirsh, I.J.: Development of Speech Sounds in Children. Acta Otolaryngol. Suppl. 257, 1–51 (1969)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Batliner, A., Blomberg, M., D’Arcy, S., Elenius, D., Giuliani, D., Gerosa, M., Hacker, C., Russell, M., Steidl, S., Wong, M.: The PF_STAR Children’s Speech Corpus. In: Proc. Interspeech, Lisbon (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Eskernazi, M.: KIDS: A Database of Children’s Speech. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100(4), 2759–2759 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Cucchiarini, C., Van Hamme, H., van Herwijnen, O., Smits, F.: JASMIN-CGN: Extension of the Spoken Dutch Corpus with Speech of Elderly People, Children and Non-natives in the Human-Machine Interaction Modality. In: Proc. LREC, Genoa (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Lopes, C., Veiga, A., Perdigão, F.: A European Portuguese Children Speech Database for Computer Aided Speech Therapy. In: Caseli, H., Villavicencio, A., Teixeira, A., Perdigão, F. (eds.) PROPOR 2012. LNCS, vol. 7243, pp. 368–374. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. The Portuguese Speecon Database, http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=798

  17. Kinect for Windows, http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/

  18. Unger, H.G.: Encyclopedia of American Education, 3rd edn. Facts on File Inc., New York (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  19. CETEMPúblico, http://www.linguateca.pt/cetempublico/

  20. Freitas, J., Calado, A., Braga, D., Silva, P., Dias, M.: Crowd-Sourcing Platform for Large-Scale Speech Data Collection. In: Proc. FALA 2010, Vigo (2010)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Hämäläinen, A. et al. (2013). The CNG Corpus of European Portuguese Children’s Speech. In: Habernal, I., Matoušek, V. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8082. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40585-3_68

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40585-3_68

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40584-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40585-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics