Artificial intelligence for early speech production (AI4ESP)

Artificial intelligence for early speech production (AI4ESP) is sponsored by European Commission. A Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project focusing on AI applications in early speech production, with potential for industry collaboration.

Artificial intelligence for early speech production Decoding baby babble with AI Babbling is an early sign that a baby is learning to talk. It is also difficult for researchers to study and transcribe every sound after listening to endless hours of recordings.

Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the AI4ESP project is creating an open-source phone-recognition system for baby vocalisations by combining research on language acquisition, machine learning, and speech processing. Additionally, it presents a method for identifying when infants begin to mimic their mother tongue or other languages in their babbling.

AI4ESP will investigate the cultural differences in babbling through recordings across a variety of languages. It will also find early indicators of speech disorders using extensive multilingual data. This instrument will provide clinical understanding of both normal and abnormal early vocal development.

Show the project objective Hide the project objective Babbling is a critical milestone of infant speech development. In only 12 months, infants explore how to move their mouth, tongue, and vocal cords to produce increasingly complex sounds before eventually producing their first words.

Investigating early vocal development in both typical and atypical infant populations requires meticulous efforts involving the time-consuming and labor-intensive process of manually transcribing children’s linguistic productions.

The present action, at the crossroads between speech processing, machine learning, and language acquisition, proposes to 1) build an open-source automatic universal phone recognizer for infant vocalizations to accelerate language acquisition research; 2) design an innovative measure to assess when early vocalizations reflect the infant’s ambient language(s); and 3) apply the developed methodology to the study of typical and atypical infant populations.

By combining large-scale multilingual corpora and state-of-the-art automatic speech processing tools, our first objective is to endow researchers with a novel tool to advance our understanding of infants’ early vocal development. Our second objective is to shed new light on the simple yet controversial question: When do infants start exhibiting distinct babbling patterns across different languages?

Beyond its theoretical implications, our proposal holds clinical significance as we will apply the developed tools and measures to investigate early vocal markers associated with speech disorders, constituting our third objective. Fields of science (EuroSciVoc) CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

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