Typicality and Emotion in the Voice of Children with Autism Spectrum Condition: Evidence Across Three Languages

Only a few studies exist on automatic emotion analysis of speech from children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). Out of these, some preliminary studies have recently focused on comparing the relevance of selected prosodic features against large sets of acoustic, spectral, and cepstral features; however, no study so far provided a comparison of performances across different languages. The present contribution aims to fill this white spot in the literature and provide insight by extensive evaluations carried out on three databases of prompted phrases collected in English, Swedish, and Hebrew, inducing nine emotion categories embedded in short-stories. The datasets contain speech of children with ASC and typically developing children under the same conditions. We evaluate automatic diagnosis and recognition of emotions in atypical childrens voice over the nine categories including binary valence/arousal discrimination.