Developmental Disorders Manifestation in the Characteristics of the Child’s Voice and Speech: Perceptual and Acoustic Study

The paper presents the data of the perceptual experiment on recognition of the child’s developmental disorders via speech. Participants of the study were 30 children aged 11-12 years: with autism spectrum disorders (ASD, n=10), with Down syndrome (DS, n=10), typically developing (TD, n=10, control), and 50 Russian-speaking adults as listeners. The listeners were divided in 4 groups according to their professional experience: pediatric students, psychiatric students, psychiatrists, and researchers in the field of psychophysiology and child’s speech development. Every group carried out the perception task separately. The speech material for the perceptual experiment was phrases and words from spontaneous speech. The results of the perceptual experiment showed that listeners could correctly recognize the child’s state – disorders or typical development. Pediatric students classified the state of TD children better than the state of children with ASD and DS. Psychiatric students and psychia-trists recognized the state of children with ASD and DS better than pediatric students did. Acoustic features of speech samples correctly classified by listeners as uttered by children with disorders and TD children were described. High pitch values are specific for speech samples of children with ASD; long duration of stressed vowels is a feature of children with DS. The obtained data could be useful for specialists working with atypically developing children and for future studies of machine classification of the child’s state – TD, ASD, and DS.