KaSPAR: a prosodic multimodal software for dyslexia

In this work we describe our roadmap to KaSPAR (Karaoke Speech-Prosody Analyzer and Recognizer), a software application dealing with the problematic of learning English as a foreign language, for Italian (or other transparent, romance languages) mother-tongue subjects with dyslexia. We aim at enriching the traditional learning-based methods, and leveraging a multi-sensorial and emotional approach. The basic idea is to invite subjects to imitate pronunciation and prosody of an English mother-tongue speaker with visual-auditory and real-time feedback, to stimulate the modulation and the control of their oral linguistic productions. The project uses knowledge coming from different fields of study, first of all, creating a link between learning English prosodic problems in dyslexics and the extraction of acoustic features, already known in the Music Information Retrieval field and MPEG-7 encoding. Analysis protocols, based on multidimensional analysis techniques of data, collected from sessions, will assess improvements of the subject’s speech abilities, and the impact on her/his specific issues.