Abstract
The study is aimed at investigating the formation of acoustic features of speech in typically developing (TD) Russian-speaking children. The purpose of the study is to describe the dynamics of the temporal and spectral characteristics of the words of 5–16 years old children depending on their gender and age. The decrease of stressed and unstressed vowels duration from child’s words to the age of 13 years is revealed. Pitch values of vowels from words significantly decrease to the age of 14 years in girls and to the age of 16 years in boys. Pitch values of vowels from girls’ words are higher vs. corresponding features from boys’ words. Differences in the pitch values and vowel articulation index in boys and girls in different ages are shown. The obtained data on the acoustic features of the speech of TD children can be used as a normative basis in artificial intelligence systems for teaching children, for creating alternative communication systems for children with atypical development, for automatic recognition of child speech.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Kuhl, P.K., Meltzoff, A.N.: Infant vocalizations in response to speech: vocal imitation and developmental change. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100(4), 2425–2438 (1996)
Nathani, S., Ertmer, D.J., Stark, R.E.: Assessing vocal development in infants and toddlers. Clin. Linguist. Phon. 20(5), 351–369 (2006)
Lyakso, E., Gromova, A., Frolova, O., Romanova, O.: Acoustic aspect of the formation of speech in children in the third year of life. Neurosci. Behav. Physiol. 35(6), 573–583 (2005)
Liu, S., Jin, Y., Yu, H., Yang, L.: Study on the acoustic characteristics of speech and physiological development of vocal organs for two-year-old children. In: Fifth International Conference on Instrumentation and Measurement, Computer, Communication and Control, pp. 576–579. IEEE, Qinhuangdao (2015)
Ballard, K.J., Djaja, D., Arciuli, J., James, D.J.H., van Doorn, J.: Developmental trajectory for production of prosody: lexical stress contrastivity in children 3 to 7 years and adults. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 55, 1716–1735 (2012)
Brehm, S.B., Weinrich, B.D., Sprouse, D.S., May, S.K., Hughes, M.R.: An examination of elicitation method on fundamental frequency and repeatability of average airflow measures in children age 4:0–5:11 years. J. Voice 26(6), 721–725 (2012)
Lyakso, E.E., Frolova, O.V., Grigorev, A.S.: Infant vocalizations at the first year of life predict speech development at 2–7 years: longitudinal study. Child Psychol. 5(12), 1433–1445 (2014)
Hoit, J., Hixon, T., Watson, P., Morgan, W.: Speech breathing in children and adolescents. J. Speech Hear. Res. 33, 51–69 (1990)
Vorperian, H., Kent, R.: Vowel acoustic space development in children: a synthesis of acoustic and anatomic data. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 50(6), 1510–1545 (2007)
Lee, S., Iverson, G.K.: The development of monophthongal vowels in Korean: age and sex differences. Clin. Linguist. Phon. 22(7), 523–536 (2008)
Harries, M., Hawkins, S., Hacking, J., Hughes, I.: Changes in the male voice at puberty: vocal fold length and its relationship to the fundamental frequency of the voice. J. Laryngol. Otol. 112(5), 451–454 (1998)
Lee, S., Potamianos, A., Narayanan, S.: Acoustics of children’s speech: developmental changes of temporal and spectral parameters. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 105, 1455–1468 (1999)
Bonneh, Y.S., Levanon, Y., Dean-Pardo, O., Lossos, L., Adini, Y.: Abnormal speech spectrum and increased pitch variability in young autistic children. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 4(237), 1–7 (2011)
Kent, R.D., Vorperian, H.K.: Speech impairment in down syndrome: a review. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 56(1), 178–210 (2013)
Fortunato-Tavares, T., Andrade, C.R.F., Befi-Lopes, D., Limongi, S.O., Fernandes, F.D.M., Schwartz, R.G.: Syntactic comprehension and working memory in children with specific language impairment, autism or down syndrome. Clin. Linguist. Phon. 29(7), 499–522 (2015)
Lyakso, E.: Characteristics of infant’s vocalizations during the first year of life. Int. J. Psychophysiol. 30, 150–151 (1998)
Lyakso, E.E.: Phonological developments of Russian children during the first postnatal year. In: Joint Conference of the IX International Congress for the Study of Child Language and the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders, p. 171. SRCLD-IASCL, Madison, USA (2002)
Lyakso, E., Frolova, O.: Russian vowels system acoustic features development in ontogenesis. In: Interspeech 2007, pp. 2309–2313. Antwerp, Belgium (2007)
Lyakso, E.E., Frolova, O.V., Stolyarova, E.I.: Russian child speech development in mother–child interaction: basis rules and individual features. Int. J. Psychophysiol. 69(3), 306–307 (2008)
Lyakso, E.E., Grigor’ev, A.S.: Dynamics of the duration and frequency characteristics of vowels during the first seven years of life in children. Neurosci. Behav. Physiol. 45(5), 558–567 (2015)
Kurazova, A.V., Lyakso, E.E.: Speech development of children and vocal-speech interaction in the triads “mother-twins”: longitudinal study. Bull. St. Petersburg State Univ. 3, 93–103 (2012). (in Russian)
Lyakso, E., Frolova, O., Grigorev, A.: A comparison of acoustic features of speech of typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 9811, 43–50 (2016)
Lyakso, E., Frolova, O., Grigorev, A.: Perception and acoustic features of speech of children with autism spectrum disorders. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 10458, 602–612 (2017)
Lyakso, E.E., Frolova, O.V., Grigor’ev, A.S., Sokolova, V.D., Yarotskaya, K.A.: Recognition by adults of emotional state in typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders. Neurosci. Behav. Physiol. 47(9), 1051–1059 (2017)
Fernando, S., et al.: Automatic recognition of child speech for robotic applications in noisy environments. Comput. Speech Lang. 1–28 (2016). arXiv:1611.02695v1 [cs.CL]
Roy, N., Nissen, S.L., Dromey, C., Sapir, S.: Articulatory changes in muscle tension dysphonia: evidence of vowel space expansion following manual circumlaryngeal therapy. J. Commun. Disord. 42(2), 124–135 (2009)
Boliek, C.A., Hixon, T.J., Watson, P.J., Jones, P.B.: Refinement of speech breathing in healthy 4- to 6-year-old children. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 52, 990–1007 (2009)
Hacki, T., Heitmuller, S.: Development of the child’s voice: premutation, mutation. Int. J. Pediatr. Otorhinolaryngol. 49(1), 141–144 (1999)
Fitch, W.T., Giedd, J.: Morphology and development of the human vocal tract: a study using magnetic resonance imaging. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 1511–1522 (1999)
Hollien, H., Green, R., Massey, K.: Longitudinal research on adolescent voice change in males. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 96, 2646–2654 (1994)
Perry, T.L., Ohde, R.N., Ashmead, D.H.: The acoustic bases for gender identification from children’s voices. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 109, 2988–2998 (2001)
Markova, D., et al.: Age- and sex-related variations in vocal-tract morphology and voice acoustic during adolescence. Horm. Behav. 81, 84–96 (2016)
Wan, P., Huang, Z., Zheng, Q.: Acoustic elementary research on voice resonance of Chinese population. Chin. J. Surg. 24(6), 250–252 (2010)
Kaya, H., Salah, A.A., Karpov, A., Frolova, O., Grigorev, A., Lyakso, E.: Emotion, age, and gender classification in children’s speech by humans and machines. Comput. Speech Lang. 46, 268–283 (2017)
Acknowledgements
This study is financially supported by Russian Science Foundation (Project № 18-18-00063).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Grigorev, A., Frolova, O., Lyakso, E. (2018). Acoustic Features of Speech of Typically Developing Children Aged 5–16 Years. In: Ustalov, D., Filchenkov, A., Pivovarova, L., Žižka, J. (eds) Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language. AINL 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 930. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01204-5_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01204-5_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01203-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01204-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)