PRAUTOCAL corpus: a corpus for the study of Down syndrome prosodic aspects

Abstract

Oral productions of speakers with Down syndrome exhibit special characteristics that have been the target of study for decades. In spite of this attention, the availability of rich resources for its analysis is still scarce. In this paper, we present the definition and compiling procedure of a corpus of semicontrolled oral productions of speakers with Down syndrome that aims to allow the analysis of how these speakers with these speakers produce functional and linguistic aspects of speech. The PRAUTOCAL corpus has been recorded while using a video game for training oral competences. Utterances are related to well defined communicative tasks recorded by both speakers with Down syndrome and typically developing speakers. We present the procedure for human experts to evaluate the recordings and the transcription criteria followed for enriching the utterances of the corpus. PRAUTOCAL permits the analysis of the clear contrast in voice and speech between individuals with Down syndrome and typically developing speakers, taking into account the high heterogeneity of the speech problems characteristic of the syndrome. This material allows the analysis of the speech problems in Down syndrome, with applications to the generation of knowledge that could be used in future works for therapists to prepare specific training or enriching diagnosis regarding possible speech and language disorders.

Discourse Diversity Database (3D) for Clinical Linguistics Research: Design, Development, and Analysis

“…Some of the clinical corpora include spoken language samples of various sizes, ranging from single phonemes to small discourse passages. For example, the PRAUTOCAL corpus of speech in Down syndrome (Escudero-Mancebo et al, 2021) contains sentences obtained from speakers with Down syndrome during a video game and qualitatively assessed by several experts. The EasyCall is a dysarthric speech dataset of commands most likely to be used in a voice-controlled contact application (Turrisi et al, 2021).…”

Prosodic Feature Analysis for Automatic Speech Assessment and Individual Report Generation in People with Down Syndrome

“…The incorrect or highly noisy audio files were removed, but no further processing was conducted on them. Additional information can be found in [19].…”

“…The samples collected in the gaming sessions have been evaluated by four different annotators at different stages of the project [19]. Two of the assessments were made during the gaming process, another was carried out by a prosody expert outside the gaming environment, and the last was made by an automatic classifier.…”

“…In the near future, this system will be incorporated into the video game, allowing users to train independently. A detailed description of the oral activities can be found in [19].…”

Regionalized models for Spanish language variations based on Twitter

“…There are several examples of linguistic resources attending specific tasks or applications, such as the study of Down syndrome in Escudero-Mancebo et al (2022). Also, on CKennedy et al (2022), a corpus is proposed for hate-based rhetoric, or hate recognition.…”