How Spoken Language Corpora Can Refine Current Speech Motor Training Methodologies

The growing availability of spoken language corpora presents new opportunities for enriching the methodologies of speech and language therapy. In this paper, we present a novel approach for constructing speech motor exercises, based on linguistic knowledge extracted from spoken language corpora. In our study with the Dutch Spoken Corpus, syllabic inventories were obtained by means of automatic syllabification of the spoken language data. Our experimental syllabification method exhibited a reliable performance, and allowed for the acquisition of syllabic tokens from the corpus. Consequently, the syllabic tokens were integrated in a tool for clinicians, a result which holds the potential of contributing to the current state of speech motor training methodologies.