Prosodic exercises for children with ASD via virtual therapy

Abstract

which means that there is a wide degree of variation in the way it affects people. It is known that, even though it has a huge spectrum, the characterization of the speech of autistic children has been consensual in the literature as devoid of wealth prosodic parameters manifested by healthy children, such as the emotional aspects that are reflected in communicative interaction. The use of technology as a teaching tool has been growing and the presentation of educational exercises through electronic devices reveals itself as more attractive and captivating for children when compared with traditional methods. In this project, we developed prosodic exercises for intonation assessment in an imitation task, where the main focus is the development and enrichment of prosodic abilities of children with autism spectrum disorders, as a complement to therapy sessions.We evaluated the intonation assessment method, achieving accuracy values between 70%and 83.3%, depending on the feature set adapted (pitch, energy, Mel-Frequency Cepstral features, and pseudo-syllable information), and also by making a fusion of all features. Although the original intention was to integrate these exercises in an existing platform for children diagnosed with ASD, the current implementation is a stand-alone mobile application.