Speaker-dependent speech recognition as the basis for a speech training aid

The Indiana Speech Training Aid project (ISTRA) is evaluating the use of speaker-dependent speech recognition to provide feedback for deaf speakers or normal-hearing misarticulating children, to assist them in improving their speech. Ongoing clinical trials of the ISTRA system have demonstrated effective improvement in speech production. The theoretical approach is first to form templates from a child's current best productions of a word and then to use the score generated by matching new utterances to these templates as feedback to indicate the goodness of articulation. This paper presents the results of several evaluations of the utility of the SRB metric as a substitute for human judgement of the goodness of articulation of a whole word. Also, the confusion matrices resulting from recognition of acoustically similar words are discussed in terms of possible modifications of the algorithms.