The major theme of the project focuses on analyzing human infant speech patterns over time.

This
means analyzing the progression and evolution of several babies' utterances over a time scale of about
one year. We will focus on identifying typical and atypical trajectories for speech patterns. A second
major theme of the project intends to see if this analysis can capably use techniques specialized for
birdsong analysis. There is a large corpus of research on birdsong that we hope to utilize in this project.
Songbirds seem to learn their songs similar to how baby humans learn to speak; however, there are
differences that might invalidate or complicate this approach. It will be interesting to see how
applicable birdsong analysis is to infant speech.

This work is inter-disciplinary so there exist many papers to aid us. There are several papers on
songbird vocalization and its related neurology. The research typically aims to isolate the neural
activity involved in learning songs and discriminating between relevant and irrelevant vocalizations.
The research has produced hints into the neural mechanisms of vocalization for songbirds. Research
has built off of these findings, aiming to locate the neural mechanisms for vocalizations in humans
since songbird and human brain anatomy differs. There is also a corpus of research focusing on human
speech learning. This research typically focuses on language acquisition in the critical period.

How early can we detect atypical patterns? Babies begin learning speech by simple babbling. Previous
work has found that deaf babies begin babbling later than non-deaf babies. This leads us to believe that
other disorders may also cause differences in very-early speech development. We hope to find out how
early-on these differences can be found to be significant. Is it possible to model using similar
techniques on songbirds? Songbirds have been found to learn their songs in a way similar to how
babies learn to speak. We wish to assess how useful birdsong analysis is in analyzing infant speech
patterns. Our findings will shed additional light on how similar songbird and human vocalization
learning is.

This research stems from a lab that works with songbirds. Therefore, we will originally take an
approach rooted in birdsong analysis. The first parts of research will utilize Sound Analysis Pro (SAP),
an open-source software package that allows for simpler analysis of songbird utterances. Human
speech and birdsong share several similar qualities. Due to this fact, we will first run the infant speech
soundwaves through SAP to see how useful the birdsong analysis approach is. Working from here, we
will edit SAP to fine-tune it for human infant speech. The goal of the SAP analysis is to find useful
parameters for the speech data so that we can reduce the complexity and dimensionality of the data,
thus making future analysis much easier. If this method also fails, we will begin taking a different
approach rooted in human speech analysis. This will include researching human speech recognition
methods and implementing them in a cohesive system.

Sound Analysis Pro (SAP) requires a Windows machine to run on. Using and editing SAP will be a
major part of this project. Having a Windows laptop to work on at all times will significantly reduce the
burden of having to use school-supplied desktops that cannot save our workspace. Additionally, SAP is
also computationally intensive. This means that we will need to have a computer capable of running it.
The computers currently available to our lab do not excel at running SAP. In short, having a Windows
laptop will allow remote working. Remote working will significantly increase our ability to work on
the project as we will not have to work around schedules to find appropriate meet-up times.

We will evaluate our findings both qualitatively and quantitatively. A failing program would do a
poorer job at classifying speech patterns than the average person. We can easily assess programs that
fail to classify sounds as well as the average human. A better program would be able to classify sounds
better than the average person, and on par with a specialist. Since we have data points spanning many
months, we have the ability to determine whether a speech pattern is irregular well before it may

become audibly noticeable to us based on its eventual progression into a more severe speech
deficiency. We will also need to evaluate the ability of the birdsong approach compared to a more
human-focused approach. This can be quantitatively analyzed in the parametrization and recognition of
waveforms.

Our research has large implications for speech pathology. Unless a child's early speech deficiency is
incredibly significant, it will go unnoticed by parents, and even general practitioners. This means that
many children develop significant speech deficiencies that can be costly and time-consuming to fix.
During this time when the speech deficiency is noticeable but still being improved, children will be less
inclined to socialize for fear of having their speech mocked. This only further stunts the development
of the child's speech and social skills. If we were able to detect many common speech deficiencies that
currently go unnoticed at young ages (< 3 years old), we could intervene at an earlier time when
children's speech is much more malleable. This would allow more children to develop normal speech,
avoid additional speech therapy costs, and prevent any social exclusion stemming from the speech
deficiency. If our research is successful, we could implement a mobile app that would allow parents to
record and automatically analyze their children's speech, indicating at an early age whether or not
speech therapy is recommended.