Investigating recognition of children's speech

Recognition of children's speech was investigated by considering a phone recognition task. Two baseline systems were trained, one for children and one for adults, by exploiting two Italian speech databases. Under matching conditions, for training and recognition performed with data from the same population group, the phone recognition accuracy was 77.30% and 79.43% for children and adults, respectively. It was found that, for many children, recognition results were as good as for adults. However, a higher variability in phone recognition accuracy across speakers was observed for children than for adults. Vocal tract length normalization, under matched and mismatched training and testing conditions, was also investigated. For both adults and children, a performance improvement, with respect to the baseline systems, was observed.