SPECO
team presents a workstation that provides an audio-visual articulation
teaching and training system for 5-10 year-old children. The correction
of disordered aspects of speech is done by real time visual presentation
of the speech parameters, in a way that is understandable and interesting
for young children, while remaining correct from the acoustic- phonetic
point of view. An auditory model is employed which analyses the speech
signal with such time, frequency and intensity resolution that is approximately
similar to that available to the human peripheral auditory system during
speech perception. For further processing many algorithms from the field
of speech recognition have been used for time and frequency normalisation
and distance computation for helping the comparison of the reference examples
and the patient's production.
The exercise
material is carefully graded, and includes segmental practice (e.g. vowels
and fricatives) and progression to longer stretches of speech, which include
intonation practice as well.
The graphics
are designed to be interesting and comprehensible to young children.
The
workstation is composed of two parts: one is a general language independent
frame program, the so called Measuring System and Editor and the other
is a Language Dependent Reference Database file. These two parts together
make up the Teaching and Training Support, which is the program for users.
Generally,
this frame program gives possibility to construct the teaching and training
support of any kind of languages using a well-defined database of the language.
It is possible to build a vocabulary with a special structure, according
to the language. The purpose could be the training of the speech during
language learning or the teaching of speech handicapped persons.
In
this project two databases have been developed for all participating languages.
One is for teaching and training vowels for hearing-impaired children;
the other one is for correction of misarticulated fricative and affricate
sounds.
The SPECO
system is currently functional in prototype of Hungarian, English, Slovenian
and Swedish.
The
demo versions of this system, for all languages, are presented on this
CD. Only the first examples of each exercise are active.
There are
4 setup programs on the CD, one for every language: English, Hungarian,
Slovenian, Sweden. You should start any of them and follow the instructions.
The setup program also installs the IPA 93 font on your computer.
The set
up program creates a program group in the START menu. You can start the
demo from here. The menu of the program can be activated by clicking on
the drawer in the lower right corner. In this menu, please, select Help
first, where you can read the Quick Tour of the program.
The SPECO
Project is funded by the EU through the INCO-COPERNICUS program (Contract
no. 977126).