A Survey about ASR for Children

Abstract

This paper is intended to survey the state of the art of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for children’s speech. Investigating ASR for children is a current trend in research. Therefore databases of children’s speech are needed for training and testing of ASR systems. In the first part of this paper the most relevant databases of children’s speech are described. There are less speech data of children available than of adults and speech of preschool children is even more rarely available. In the second part of this paper the common techniques for recognizing children’s speech are summarized. Most investigations about children’s ASR focus on the acoustic model. The common methods are described and approaches regarding the lexical and speech model are mentioned subsequently. In an extensive literature research we collected papers investigating ASR for children. Several studies have been carried out investigating children’s ASR. Due to the lack of data from preschool children only a few investigations for this age group have been accomplished. This is illustrated by presenting a statistic on the age of the children in past studies.