Speech Corpus for Korean Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Towards Automatic Assessment Systems
This addresses the lack of speech data for Korean children with ASD, enabling development of digital therapeutics and assessment tools for this specific population.
This paper introduces the first speech corpus for Korean children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), containing recordings from 73 ASD and 9 typically developing children, with annotations for articulatory/linguistic features and clinical ratings. Analysis revealed distinct speech/linguistic characteristics in ASD children that correlate with clinical scores, demonstrating potential for automatic assessment systems.
Despite the growing demand for digital therapeutics for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), there is currently no speech corpus available for Korean children with ASD. This paper introduces a speech corpus specifically designed for Korean children with ASD, aiming to advance speech technologies such as pronunciation and severity evaluation. Speech recordings from speech and language evaluation sessions were transcribed, and annotated for articulatory and linguistic characteristics. Three speech and language pathologists rated these recordings for social communication severity (SCS) and pronunciation proficiency (PP) using a 3-point Likert scale. The total number of participants will be 300 for children with ASD and 50 for typically developing (TD) children. The paper also analyzes acoustic and linguistic features extracted from speech data collected and completed for annotation from 73 children with ASD and 9 TD children to investigate the characteristics of children with ASD and identify significant features that correlate with the clinical scores. The results reveal some speech and linguistic characteristics in children with ASD that differ from those in TD children or another subgroup of ASD categorized by clinical scores, demonstrating the potential for developing automatic assessment systems for SCS and PP.