Electroencephalographic Correlate of Mexican Spanish Emotional Speech Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder: To a Social Story and Robot-Based Intervention

Abstract

Socio-emotional impairments are key symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorders. This work proposes to analyze the neuronal activity related to the discrimination of emotional prosodies in autistic children (aged 9 to 11-year-old) as follows. Firstly, a database for single words uttered in Mexican Spanish by males, females, and children will be created. Then, optimal acoustic features for emotion characterization will be extracted, followed of a cubic kernel function Support Vector Machine (SVM) in order to validate the speech corpus. As a result, human-specific acoustic properties of emotional voice signals will be identified. Secondly, those identified acoustic properties will be modified to synthesize the recorded human emotional voices. Thirdly, both human and synthesized utterances will be used to study the electroencephalographic correlate of affective prosody processing in typically developed and autistic children. Finally, and on the basis of the outcomes, synthesized voice-enhanced environments will be created to develop an intervention based on social-robot and Social StoryTM for autistic children to improve affective prosodies discrimination. This protocol has been registered at BioMed Central under the following number: ISRCTN18117434.

Mexican Emotional Speech Database Based on Semantic, Frequency, Familiarity, Concreteness, and Cultural Shaping of Affective Prosody

“…This study is the first stage of a project registered at the Biomedical Center under the following number: ISRCTN18117434 [67] and is part of the realization of the study protocol published under the following https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.626146 (accessed on 15 November 2021) [68].…”

Progress and Trends of Affective Prosody Research over 25 Years: A Bibliometrics-Based Visualization Analysis (1997–2021)

“…As for patient groups, several populations were identified as key research concerns, including schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease, or emerging targets like bipolar disorder (frequency: 25, dispersion: 21), whose functional and neurological responses to affective prosody can be noticeably impaired. Autism, as a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by changes in affective prosody identification ability (Icht et al, 2021), has earned attention from a significantly increasing amount of research over the past decade, and affective prosody-related functional problems (Song et al, 2020) and clinical intervention approaches (Duville et al, 2021;Leung et al, 2021) have been examined in this population. Another aspect covered by clinical implications pertains to the hearing-aid apparatus.…”

“…As such, observable differences may exist in both production and perception of affective prosody among tonal and non-tonal language users. In addition to the academic scope, affective prosody is showing its presence in the computer science and engineering fields, and has been tentatively used as an intervention approach for life quality improvement (Duville et al, 2021;Lee, 2021). In the future, researchers need to deepen the connection between academic findings and industrial applications.…”

A Usabilidade Da Robótica Em Intervenções Educacionais Em Crianças Autistas Na Perspectiva Da Cidadania Digital

“…A robótica e a interação homem-robô têm demonstrado grande potencial para auxiliar no diagnóstico e desenvolvimento de pessoas com Transtorno do Espectro do Autismo (TEA) (DIEHL et al, 2014;CLABAUGH et al, 2019). Esse potencial passa pelas suas capacidades de oferecer meios eficientes de medir o envolvimento das crianças bem como permitir uma interação mais natural com as mesmas, de modo a conseguir oferecer intervenção em tempo hábil (RUDOVIC et al, 2017) Diversas pesquisas apontam muitos benefícios no uso da robótica na intervenção e atendimento de crianças com autismo, especialmente em atendimentos a longo prazo, e indicam que, para tanto, é necessário a personalização autônoma de sistemas robóticos.…”

“…A robótica e a interação homem-robô têm demonstrado grande potencial para auxiliar no diagnóstico e desenvolvimento de pessoas com TEA (DIEHL et al, 2014;CLABAUGH et al, 2019). Esse potencial passa pelas suas capacidades de oferecer meios eficientes de medir o envolvimento das crianças, bem como permitir uma interação mais natural com as mesmas, de modo a conseguir oferecer intervenção em tempo hábil (RUDOVIC et al, 2017).…”