Investigation of Development of Phonology using Artificial Intelligence: A Preliminary Study

Background: Investigation of the development of acquisition of phonological processes is a very important phenomenon to predict language development in childhood. Phonological development refers to the gradual acquisition of an adult-like speech system used to convey meaning in a language. Adequate phonological development can lead to higher speech intelligibility, essential for perception and speech production. The test battery approach for phonological assessment includes formal as well as informal testing modalities. Speech intelligibility is a vital parameter for the assessment of phonological development. This is done via scoring collected audio speech samples, followed by IPA transcription and scoring and analysis of data manually. The primary objective of the study was to investigate the speech intelligibility score across real-timed stimuli (rhyming, storytelling, open-ended questions, and picture description tasks) across two age categories, i.e., 3-4 and 4-5 years among 40 Hindi-speaking children. Methods: A total of 40 children (15 girls and 25 boys) in the age range of 3 to 5 years were randomly selected from a junior high school in New Delhi, India. Groupwise speech intelligibility score was calculated for rhyming, storytelling, open-ended questions, and picture description tasks. Results: It was observed that the speech intelligibility score for open-ended questions was significantly higher in the 4-5 years group (94.09 ± 3.7) than the 3-4 years (89.83 ± 8.2), t (1, 38) =2.12, p =0.04). However, no significant improvement in rhyming task [t (1, 38) =1.14, p =0.18), storytelling [t (1, 38) =1.81, p =0.07), and picture description [t (1, 38) =1.89, p =0.06) was observed. Conclusion: Chances of error in conventional method of phonology assessment still persists which may be controlled using Artificial Intelligence (AI). The target phonetic stimulus can be customized based on the linguistic experience and environment.