Employing self-supervised learning models for cross-linguistic child speech maturity classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Theo, Suresh, Madurya, Warlaumont, Anne S., Hitczenko, Kasia, Cristia, Alejandrina, Cychosz, Margaret
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhang, Theo
Suresh, Madurya
Warlaumont, Anne S.
Hitczenko, Kasia
Cristia, Alejandrina
Cychosz, Margaret
author_facet Zhang, Theo
Suresh, Madurya
Warlaumont, Anne S.
Hitczenko, Kasia
Cristia, Alejandrina
Cychosz, Margaret
contents Speech technology systems struggle with many downstream tasks for child speech due to small training corpora and the difficulties that child speech pose. We apply a novel dataset, SpeechMaturity, to state-of-the-art transformer models to address a fundamental classification task: identifying child vocalizations. Unlike previous corpora, our dataset captures maximally ecologically-valid child vocalizations across an unprecedented sample, comprising children acquiring 25+ languages in the U.S., Bolivia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and France. The dataset contains 242,004 labeled vocalizations, magnitudes larger than previous work. Models were trained to distinguish between cry, laughter, mature (consonant+vowel), and immature speech (just consonant or vowel). Models trained on the dataset outperform state-of-the-art models trained on previous datasets, achieved classification accuracy comparable to humans, and were robust across rural and urban settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_08999
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Employing self-supervised learning models for cross-linguistic child speech maturity classification
Zhang, Theo
Suresh, Madurya
Warlaumont, Anne S.
Hitczenko, Kasia
Cristia, Alejandrina
Cychosz, Margaret
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Speech technology systems struggle with many downstream tasks for child speech due to small training corpora and the difficulties that child speech pose. We apply a novel dataset, SpeechMaturity, to state-of-the-art transformer models to address a fundamental classification task: identifying child vocalizations. Unlike previous corpora, our dataset captures maximally ecologically-valid child vocalizations across an unprecedented sample, comprising children acquiring 25+ languages in the U.S., Bolivia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and France. The dataset contains 242,004 labeled vocalizations, magnitudes larger than previous work. Models were trained to distinguish between cry, laughter, mature (consonant+vowel), and immature speech (just consonant or vowel). Models trained on the dataset outperform state-of-the-art models trained on previous datasets, achieved classification accuracy comparable to humans, and were robust across rural and urban settings.
title Employing self-supervised learning models for cross-linguistic child speech maturity classification
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08999