Speech Corpus for Korean Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Towards
  Automatic Assessment Systems
Seonwoo Lee Jihyun Mun Sunhee Kim Minhwa Chung
Despite the growing demand for digital therapeutics for children with Autism
Spectrum Disorder (ASD), there is currently no speech corpus available for
Korean children with ASD. This paper introduces a speech corpus specifically
designed for Korean children with ASD, aiming to advance speech technologies
such as pronunciation and severity evaluation. Speech recordings from speech
and language evaluation sessions were transcribed, and annotated for
articulatory and linguistic characteristics. Three speech and language
pathologists rated these recordings for social communication severity (SCS) and
pronunciation proficiency (PP) using a 3-point Likert scale. The total number
of participants will be 300 for children with ASD and 50 for typically
developing (TD) children. The paper also analyzes acoustic and linguistic
features extracted from speech data collected and completed for annotation from
73 children with ASD and 9 TD children to investigate the characteristics of
children with ASD and identify significant features that correlate with the
clinical scores. The results reveal some speech and linguistic characteristics
in children with ASD that differ from those in TD children or another subgroup
of ASD categorized by clinical scores, demonstrating the potential for
developing automatic assessment systems for SCS and PP.