ISCA Archive - Automatic evaluation of the pronunciation of people with Down syndrome in an educational video game (EvaProDown)
ISCA Archive IberSPEECH 2022
ISCA Archive IberSPEECH 2022

Automatic evaluation of the pronunciation of people with Down syndrome in an educational video game (EvaProDown)

César González-Ferreras, Valentín Cardeñoso-Payo, David Escudero-Mancebo, Carlos Enrique Vivaracho-Pascual, Lourdes Aguilar, Valle Flores-Lucas, Mario Corrales-Astorgano

The deficiencies in oral communication of people with Down syndrome (DS) represent an important barrier towards their social integration. Interventions based on performing exercises of speech and language therapy have proven to be effective in improving their communication skills. Our research group has been involved in the development of a serious video game for the practice of oral communication of people with Down syndrome. The video game has proven its usefulness by being able to motivate users to carry out practical exercises designed to improve their communication skills related to prosody, an important aspect of spoken communication. The video game has also facilitated the compilation of a speech corpus called Prautocal with a large number of utterances of people with DS. The objective of this project is to extend the functionality of the video game to include exercises focused on pronunciation and on improving articulation and speech intelligibility. To do this, an automatic pronunciation assessment module will be developed and incorporated into the existing video game in order to complement its functionality. In this way, using the video game, users will be able to perform exercises autonomously to work on aspects of speech related to both pronunciation and prosody.