Speech Intelligibility and the Production of Fricative and Affricate among Mandarin-speaking Children with Cerebral Palsy

Literatures pertaining to English and Mandarin fricative/affricate productions by adults with cerebral palsy (CP) showed that acoustic measurements such as rise time contrast, initial burst rate contrast and friction noise duration contrast associated with fricative/affricate productions were highly correlated with overall speech intelligibility. However, the phonetic features of fricatives/affricates produced by Mandarin-learning children with CP were not fully explored. Therefore, this study targets on fricatives/affricates produced by ten Mandarin-learning CP children (Mean: 6;10, Range: 4;6 – 8;11) and ten Mandarin-learning typically developing children (Mean: 5;7, Range: 5;2 – 6;1). The current results from a speech repetition task showed that: 1) The fricative/affricate accurate rates and error patterns were similar between the two The 2016 Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing ROCLING 2016, pp. 153-163  The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing