The Effects of Bandwidth Reduction on Human and Computer Recognition of Children's Speech

Bandwidth affects recognition of children's speech by humans and machines. The increase in automatic speech recognition errors caused by reducing bandwidth from 8 to 4 kHz is over 100% greater for children's speech than for adults'. The increase in error rate as bandwidth decreases is similar for computer recognition of speech from children whose pronunciation is judged to be good, and human recognition of general children's speech. For children with poorer pronunciation, bandwidth effects are masked by general variability. The results predict machine error rates for telephone bandwidth children's speech between 30% and 95% greater than for adults'.