Phone Duration Modeling for Speaker Age Estimation in Children

Automatic inference of important paralinguistic information such as age from speech is an important area of research with numerous spoken language technology based applications. Speaker age estimation has applications in enabling personalization and age-appropriate curation of information and content. However, research in speaker age estimation in children is especially challenging due to paucity of relevant speech data representing the developmental spectrum, and the high signal variability especially intra age variability that complicates modeling. Most approaches in children speaker age estimation adopt methods directly from research on adult speech processing. In this paper, we propose features specific to children and focus on speaker's phone duration as an important biomarker of children's age. We propose phone duration modeling for predicting age from child's speech. To enable that, children speech is first forced aligned with the corresponding transcription to derive phone duration distributions. Statistical functionals are computed from phone duration distributions for each phoneme which are in turn used to train regression models to predict speaker age. Two children speech datasets are employed to demonstrate the robustness of phone duration features. We perform age regression experiments on age categories ranging from children studying in kindergarten to grade 10. Experimental results suggest phone durations contain important development-related information of children. Phonemes contributing most to estimation of children speaker age are analyzed and presented.