Verifying pronunciation accuracy from speakers with neuromuscular disorders

This paper presents a study of confidence measure based techniques for detecting phoneme level mispronunciations in utterances from impaired children with neuromuscular disorders. Several different adaptation scenarios are investigated to determine the effects of mismatched speaker characteristics and mismatched task domain on the ability to verify the phoneme level pronunciations. These techniques are evaluated in the context of a speech corpus where utterances were elicited from children in interactive speech therapy sessions involving a multimodal game-like environment. Results are presented in terms of phone detection charateristics where, for example, equal error rates of as low as 16.2% were obtained for detecting instances where phonemes were deleted by impaired speakers.