Earlier identification of children with autism spectrum disorder: An automatic vocalisation-based approach

Copyright © 2017 ISCA. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder usually diagnosed in or beyond toddlerhood. ASD is defined by repetitive and restricted behaviours, and deficits in social communication. The early speech-language development of individuals with ASD has been char...

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Main Authors: Pokorny, F., Schuller, B., Marschik, P., Brueckner, R., Nyström, P., Cummins, N., Bolte, Sven, Einspieler, C., Falck-Ytter, T.
Format: Conference Paper
Published: 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/62419
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author Pokorny, F.
Schuller, B.
Marschik, P.
Brueckner, R.
Nyström, P.
Cummins, N.
Bolte, Sven
Einspieler, C.
Falck-Ytter, T.
author_facet Pokorny, F.
Schuller, B.
Marschik, P.
Brueckner, R.
Nyström, P.
Cummins, N.
Bolte, Sven
Einspieler, C.
Falck-Ytter, T.
author_sort Pokorny, F.
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description Copyright © 2017 ISCA. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder usually diagnosed in or beyond toddlerhood. ASD is defined by repetitive and restricted behaviours, and deficits in social communication. The early speech-language development of individuals with ASD has been characterised as delayed. However, little is known about ASD-related characteristics of pre-linguistic vocalisations at the feature level. In this study, we examined pre-linguistic vocalisations of 10-month-old individuals later diagnosed with ASD and a matched control group of typically developing individuals (N = 20). We segmented 684 vocalisations from parent-child interaction recordings. All vocalisations were annotated and signal-analytically decomposed. We analysed ASD-related vocalisation specificities on the basis of a standardised set (eGeMAPS) of 88 acoustic features selected for clinical speech analysis applications. 54 features showed evidence for a differentiation between vocalisations of individuals later diagnosed with ASD and controls. In addition, we evaluated the feasibility of automated, vocalisation-based identification of individuals later diagnosed with ASD.We compared linear kernel support vector machines and a 1-layer bidirectional long short-term memory neural network. Both classification approaches achieved an accuracy of 75% for subject-wise identification in a subject-independent 3-fold cross-validation scheme. Our promising results may be an important contribution en-route to facilitate earlier identification of ASD.
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-624192018-02-01T05:58:13Z Earlier identification of children with autism spectrum disorder: An automatic vocalisation-based approach Pokorny, F. Schuller, B. Marschik, P. Brueckner, R. Nyström, P. Cummins, N. Bolte, Sven Einspieler, C. Falck-Ytter, T. Copyright © 2017 ISCA. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder usually diagnosed in or beyond toddlerhood. ASD is defined by repetitive and restricted behaviours, and deficits in social communication. The early speech-language development of individuals with ASD has been characterised as delayed. However, little is known about ASD-related characteristics of pre-linguistic vocalisations at the feature level. In this study, we examined pre-linguistic vocalisations of 10-month-old individuals later diagnosed with ASD and a matched control group of typically developing individuals (N = 20). We segmented 684 vocalisations from parent-child interaction recordings. All vocalisations were annotated and signal-analytically decomposed. We analysed ASD-related vocalisation specificities on the basis of a standardised set (eGeMAPS) of 88 acoustic features selected for clinical speech analysis applications. 54 features showed evidence for a differentiation between vocalisations of individuals later diagnosed with ASD and controls. In addition, we evaluated the feasibility of automated, vocalisation-based identification of individuals later diagnosed with ASD.We compared linear kernel support vector machines and a 1-layer bidirectional long short-term memory neural network. Both classification approaches achieved an accuracy of 75% for subject-wise identification in a subject-independent 3-fold cross-validation scheme. Our promising results may be an important contribution en-route to facilitate earlier identification of ASD. 2017 Conference Paper http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/62419 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1007 restricted
spellingShingle Pokorny, F.
Schuller, B.
Marschik, P.
Brueckner, R.
Nyström, P.
Cummins, N.
Bolte, Sven
Einspieler, C.
Falck-Ytter, T.
Earlier identification of children with autism spectrum disorder: An automatic vocalisation-based approach
title Earlier identification of children with autism spectrum disorder: An automatic vocalisation-based approach
title_full Earlier identification of children with autism spectrum disorder: An automatic vocalisation-based approach
title_fullStr Earlier identification of children with autism spectrum disorder: An automatic vocalisation-based approach
title_full_unstemmed Earlier identification of children with autism spectrum disorder: An automatic vocalisation-based approach
title_short Earlier identification of children with autism spectrum disorder: An automatic vocalisation-based approach
title_sort earlier identification of children with autism spectrum disorder: an automatic vocalisation-based approach
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/62419