Authors:
João Marques
1
;
João Lima
1
;
Márcia Keske-Soares
2
and
Fabrício Rubin
3
Affiliations:
1
Centro de Tecnologia, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Brazil
;
2
Centro de Ciências da Saúde, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Brazil
;
3
Petroleo Brasileiro S.A., Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Speech Therapy Software, Phonological Assessments, Digital Platforms, Contrastive Analysis.
Abstract:
The interest in software as tools to assist speech therapy has grown in recent years, with proposed features primarily focused on the analysis of children’s speech. However, there is still a gap in tools to apply phonological assessments that are suitable to collect data. In this context, our research group is working on a digital platform called “e-Fono”, which consists of a mobile application, a REST API, and a web service where the speech therapist has access to the assessments. However, despite the existence of robust tools for data analysis, predominantly used in academic contexts, no software was found with a module for phonological contrastive analysis in Brazilian Portuguese. In the contrastive analysis, the speech therapist compares and identifies the contrasts between the child’s speech and that of an adult, providing a detailed report on which phonemes and in which positions of the words the child experiences greater difficulties. Through this process, currently carried ou
t manually by the speech therapists in our group, the child’s phonetic inventory is also obtained – a list of all phonemes the child can articulate. This paper proposes the development of a contrastive analysis module, which has been implemented in the e-Fono digital platform. In our implementation, the module was able to perform an automatic contrastive analysis by comparing the child’s phonetic transcriptions with known correct transcriptions from our database. The results can be reviewed by the speech therapist, who can replace and submit information of this analysis in case of wrong or incomplete results. With these information on the platform, it will be possible to identify speech difficulties in children and guide the speech therapist toward a specific treatment for them. Finally, in this paper we also present screens from the implemented prototype, which may be available to the general public after validation and adjustments with specialists from our group.
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