reading is essentially a process of translation of textual sequences into their phonetic representations
spoken word thus play a fundamental role in reading acquisition
highly accurate automatic speech recognition (ASR ) systems exist for many languages but they are still strongly biased towards accurate processing of adult voices
HOWEVER: in reading acquisition or reading fostering scenarios one deals with speakers whoseutterances of sequences-to-be-read exhibit peculiar characteristics
As of 2023, there exists no publicly available ASR model which could accurately and reliably process child speech.
In our IHIET 2023 article, we introduce two innovations with which the problem can be partially bypasssed in context of digitally supported reading acquisition app:
In concrete terms, we have shown that after three sessions focusing on acquisition of grapheme-vowel and CV-bigrapheme correspondences had lead, in case of one particular learner, to decrease of WER from 96% to 48%.