Speech intonation in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Objective: The prosody of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has several abnormal features. We assessed the speech tone of children with ASD and of children with typical development (TD) by using a new quantitative acoustic analysis.

Methods: Our study participants consisted of 63 children (26 with ASD and 37 with TD).

Dimensional feature weighting utilizing multiple kernel learning for single-channel talker location discrimination using the acoustic transfer function.

This paper presents a method for discriminating the location of the sound source (talker) using only a single microphone. In a previous work, the single-channel approach for discriminating the location of the sound source was discussed, where the acoustic transfer function from a user's position is estimated by using a hidden Markov model of clean speech in the cepstral domain. In this paper, each cepstral dimension of the acoustic transfer function is newly weighted, in order to obtain the cepstral dimensions having information that is useful for classifying the user's position.

Monaural sound-source-direction estimation using the acoustic transfer function of a parabolic reflection board.

This paper presents a sound-source-direction estimation method using only a single microphone with a parabolic reflection board. A simple signal-power-based method using a parabolic antenna has been proposed in the radar field. But the signal-power-based method is not effective for finding the direction of a talking person due to the varying power of the uttered speech signals.