The Method for Supporting Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders using Paralinguistic Information
田中 宏季 (1051068)
Autism is a life-long developmental disability that
prevents individuals from properly understanding what they see,
hear, and otherwise sense. This results in severe difficulties in
communication, and behavior. Children with autism spectrum disorders
often do not understand the true intention of paralinguistic
signals. We focused on laughter as one kind of paralinguistic
information to support children with autism spectrum
disorders. Laughter express interest and intention. This report
presents the results of a preliminary analysis of the sounds of
human laughs in a very large corpus of naturally-occurring
conversational speech. Various types of laughter were categorized,
and the analysis of their acoustic features forms the core of this
report. Formant parameters ware compared for each call type within
a laughter bout. The report also attempts to determine the
contribution of individual acoustic features in the classification.
Furthermore for children with autism spectrum disorders who can not
speak, expressive speech synthesis including sample laughs was
implemented. We developed a systematic speech synthesizer
NOCOA (NOnverbal COmmunication for Autism), which aim to support
nonverbal communication for Individuals with autism spectrum
disorders. In this report, we explain the result and the benefit in
experiment on NOCOA.