Children’s perception of their modified speech – preliminary findings

This report describes an ongoing investigation of 4-6 year-old children’s perception of synthetically modified versions of their own recorded speech. Recordings of the children’s speech production are automatically modified so that the initial consonant is replaced by a different consonant. The task for the children is to judge the phonological accuracy (correct vs. incorrect) and the speaker identity (me vs. someone else) of each stimulus. Preliminariy results indicate that children with typical speech generally judge phonological accuracy correctly, of both original recordings and synthetically modified recordings. As a first evaluation of the re-synthesis technique with child users, the results are promising, as the children generally accept the intended phonological form, seemingly without detecting the modification.