Automatic Intonation Recognition for the Prosodic Assessment of Language-Impaired Children

This study presents a preliminary investigation into the automatic assessment of language-impaired children's (LIC) prosodic skills in one grammatical aspect: sentence modalities. Three types of language impairments were studied: autism disorder (AD), pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), and specific language impairment (SLI). A control group of typically developing (TD) children that was both age and gender matched with LIC was used for the analysis. All of the children were asked to imitate sentences that provided different types of intonation (e.g., descending and rising contours). An automatic system was then used to assess LIC's prosodic skills by comparing the intonation recognition scores with those obtained by the control group. The results showed that all LIC have difficulties in reproducing intonation contours because they achieved significantly lower recognition scores than TD children on almost all studied intonations (P < 0.05). Regarding the Rising intonation, only SLI children had high recognition scores similar to TD children, which suggests a more pronounced pragmatic impairment in AD and PDD-NOS children. The automatic approach used in this study to assess LIC's prosodic skills confirms the clinical descriptions of the subjects' communication impairments.