A Model for Sibilant Distortion Detection in Children

The distortion of sibilant sounds is a common type of speech sound disorder in European Portuguese speaking children. Speech and language pathologists (SLP) use different types of speech production tasks to assess these distortions. One of these tasks consists of the sustained production of isolated sibilants. Using these sound productions, SLPs usually rely on auditory perceptual evaluation to assess the sibilant distortions. Here we propose to use an isolated sibilant machine learning model to help SLPs assess these distortions. Our model uses Mel frequency cepstral coefficients of the isolated sibilant phones from 145 children, and was trained using support vector machines. The analysis of the false negatives detected by the model can give insight into whether the child has a sibilant production distortion. We were able to confirm that there exists a relation between the model classification results and the distortion assessment of professional SLPs. Approximately 66% of the distortion cases identified by the model are confirmed by an SLP as having some sort of distortion or are perceived as being the production of a different sound.