Lee, A., Bessell, N., Müller, N., Wright, A., Kenny, C., O’Halpin. R., Yanushevskaya, I., O’Malley, M.-P., Titterington, J., & Duffy, O.

The 18th ICPLA Conference

Speech database for teaching and assessing speech disorders and phonetics in Ireland

Glasgow, United Kingdom (online)

Poster Presentation

2021

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23-JUN-21

24-JUN-21

Background: Auditory-perceptual judgement is a fundamental clinical assessment skill of speech and language therapists (SLTs) that involves listening to a person’s speech and judging the severity level of features present (e.g. hoarse voice, nasalised speech) or using phonetic transcription to document speech errors. It has been suggested that when we listen to samples of speech disorder, mental representations of the disordered features are formed, and we rely on these mental references to perform auditory perceptual judgements. Hence, helping SLT students to develop these mental representations through systematic exposure to a wide range of disordered speech samples is important, but the relevant materials are scarce. This poster will present an all-Ireland initiative that aims to achieve the first step of addressing this issue – to build a database of typical speech samples and simulated disordered speech for SLT education purpose. Methods: Ten academic staff members specialised in phonetics, speech science, and speech and language disorders from five SLT programmes in Ireland (University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, NUI Galway, University of Limerick, and Ulster University) form the present project team. The project includes three phases: (1) to finalise a protocol for speech data collection (e.g. audio-recording equipment and setting, speech tasks to be included); (2) to record typical speech and a simulated speech disorder from each team member following the protocol; (3) to edit, label and save the sound files and distribute the materials to each of the participating programmes. Results: We are in the process of finalising the speech data collection protocol. Speech recording will take place between March and August this year. The applications of this database will be discussed. Conclusion: Plans for the next step to build a larger online database of disordered speech samples for teaching and assessment will be discussed.