My Vowels Matter: Formant Automation Tools for Diverse Child Speech

Tools to automate formant measurement in vowels have been developed recently, but they have not been tested on pediatric speech samples. Critically, child speech includes unique acoustic challenges including high fundamental frequencies, wide formant bandwidths, more variable formant values, and increased subglottal coupling relative to adult speech. More importantly, these tools have not been tested on the diverse linguistic variations spoken by children. This study compares three tools for automatic formant estimation: Voweltine, Fast Track, and SpeechMark. The tools are tested on vowel productions from a young child with a speech sound disorder from a Black-identifying family. Benefits and tradeoffs of each automation tool are discussed.