Automated screening for childhood communication disorders
For children with speech and language disorders, early-childhood intervention can make a great difference in their later academic and social success. But many such children — one study estimates 60 percent — go undiagnosed until kindergarten or even later. Researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital’s Institute of Health Professions hope to change that, with a computer system that can automatically screen young children for speech and language disorders and, potentially, even provide specific diagnoses. This week, at the Interspeech conference on speech processing, the researchers reported on an initial set of experiments with their system, which yielded promising results. “We’re nowhere near finished with this work,” says John Guttag, the Dugald C. Jackson Professor in Electrical Engineering and senior author on the new paper. “This is sort of a preliminary study. But I think it’s a pretty convincing feasibility study.” The system analyzes audio...