Connecting Speech Science and Speech Technology for Children’s Speech

Speech technology is increasingly getting embedded in everyday life, with its applications spanning from critical domains like medicine, psychiatry, education, to more commercial settings. This rapid growth is often largely contributed to the successful use of deep learning in modelling large amounts of speech data. However, performance of speech technology related applications also largely varies depending on the demographics of the population the technology has been trained on and is applied to. That is, inequity in speech technology appears across age, gender, people with vocal disorders or from atypical populations, people with non-native accents.  

This interdisciplinary session will bring together researchers working on child speech from speech science and speech technology.

A series of oral presentations (or posters) on the following topics of interest (but not limited to):

• • • Using speech science (knowledge from children’s speech acquisition, production, perception, and generally natural language understanding) to develop and improve speech technology applications.

    • Using techniques used for developing speech technology to learn more about child speech production, perception and processing.

    • Computational modelling of child speech.

    • Speech technology applications for children including (but not limited to), speech recognition, voice-conversion, language identification, segmentation, diarization etc.

    • Use and/or modification of data creation techniques, feature extraction schemes, tools and training architectures developed for adult speech for developing child speech applications.

    • Speech technology for children from typical and non-typical groups (atypical, non-native speech, slow-learners, etc.)

The session will comprise of a poster-session,  and a panel discussion. 

The goals of the poster and demo-sessions are to encourage a) academic contributions, b) application oriented contributions. 

The goal of the panel session is to talk to experts on how to facilitate the mutual development of speech-science and speech-technology for child speech community and hence accelerating the growth of research in child speech.

This session has two years of evidence demonstrating the breadth of interest and support from the Interspeech audience. The session was first held in 2023 (Dublin) with 19 accepted papers and in 2024 (Kos) contained 15 accepted papers.

In line with the theme of Interspeech 2025, Fair and Inclusive Speech Science and Technology, the proposed session will address the limitations and advances of speech technology and speech science, focusing on child speech. Furthermore, the session will aid in the mutual development of speech technology and speech science for child speech, while benefiting and bringing both the communities together.

Organizers

in alphabetical order