Development of a Database and Models for Children’s Speech in the Slovak Language for Speech-oriented Applications

Abstract

Children’s speech differs significantly from adult speech due to physiological and cognitive developmental factors. Key differences include higher pitch, a shorter vocal tract, greater formant frequencies, slower speaking rates, and greater variability in pronunciation and articulation. These differences result in acoustic mismatches between children’s and adult speech, making traditional automatic speech recognition models trained on adult speech less effective for children. Additionally, linguistic differences, such as limited vocabulary and evolving grammar, further contribute to this challenge. This paper focuses on the creation of a children’s speech database for the low-resource Slovak language. This database has been used to train acoustic models for the automatic recognition of spontaneous children’s speech in Slovak. In this research, we compared three different approaches to speech recognition, with self-supervised learning achieving results comparable to similar studies in this area, despite using relatively small amounts of training data.