Anne-Marie Öster

A Multimedia, Multilingual Teaching and Training System for Children with Speech Disorders

The development of an audiovisual pronunciation teaching and training method and software system is discussed in this article. The method is designed to help children with speech and hearing disorders gain better control over their speech production. The teaching method is drawn up for progression from individual sound preparation to practice of sounds in sentences for four languages: English, Swedish, Slovenian, and Hungarian. The system is a general language-independent measuring tool and database editor. This database editor makes it possible to construct modules for all participant languages and for different sound groups. Two modules are under development for the system in all languages: one for teaching and training vowels to hearing-impaired children and the other for correction of misarticulated fricative sounds. In the article we present the measuring methods, the used distance score calculations of the visualized speech spectra, and problems in the evaluation of the new multimedia tool.