Preliminary study of stress/neutral detection on recordings of children in the natural home environment
Autism spectrum disorder,Language Delay,Typically Developing
Yapanel, Xu, Hansen, Gray, Gilkerson, Richards
WOCCI ’09 Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Child, Computer and Interaction
Emotion
and stress/neutral detection based on an input audio stream has been a topic
of interest in the literature with various applications. This paper reports
on a preliminary study of stress/neutral detection based on naturalistic home
environment recordings of children. One major motivation of the work is to
add stress/neutral detection functionality into the LENA™ System [10]. The
study started with an acted emotion database, and tested the acoustic feature
of Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)
for stress/neutral detection on this relatively simple database. The method
was then applied to the adult speech segments automatically extracted from
home recordings of children with the LENA System, achieving 72% accuracy for
adult stress/neutral detection. The application of this new functionality to
a large number of naturalistic home environment recordings of children
reveals interesting and meaningful statistical differences among the families
of typically developing children, language-delayed children, and children
with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The result suggests the potential for
stress/neutral detection, along with the LENA System, as an integrated
solution for (i) quality assessment of the child language environment, (ii)
monitoring language interventions for disordered children, or (iii) general
psychological and behavioral research.
