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Báo cáo khoa học: "Similarity metrics for aligning children's articulation data"

This paper concerns the implementation and testing of similarity metrics for the alignment of phonetic segments in transcriptions of children's (mis)articulations with the adult model. This has an obvious application in the development of software to assist speech and language clinicians to assess clients and to plan therapy. This paper will give some of the background to this general problem, but will focus on the computational and linguistic aspect of the alignment problem. | Similarity metrics for aligning children s articulation data Harold L. SOMERS Centre for Computational Linguistics UMIST PO Box 88 Manchester M60 1QD England harold@ccl.umist.ac.uk 1. Background This paper concerns the implementation and testing of similarity metrics for the alignment of phonetic segments in transcriptions of children s mis articulations with the adult model. This has an obvious application in the development of software to assist speech and language clinicians to assess clients and to plan therapy. This paper will give some of the background to this general problem but will focus on the computational and linguistic aspect of the alignment problem. 1.1. Articulation testing It is well known that a child s acquisition of phonology is gradual and can be charted according to the appearance of phonetic distinctions e.g. stops vs. fricatives the disappearance of childish mispronunciations especially due to assimilation gog for dog and the ability to articulate particular phonetic configurations e.g. consonant clusters . Whether screening whole populations of children or assessing individual referrals the articulation test is an important tool for the speech clinician. A child s articulatory development is usually described with reference to an adult model and in terms of deviations from it a number of phonological processes can be identified and their significance with respect to the chronological age of the child assessed. Often processes interact e.g. when spoon is pronounced mun we have consonant-cluster reduction and assimilation. The problem for this paper is to align the segments in the transcription of the child s articulation with the target model pronunciation. The task is complicated by the need to identify cases of metathesis where the corresponding sounds have been reordered e.g. remember miremba and merges a special case of consonant-cluster reduction where the resulting segment has some of the features of both elements in the original .