Abstract:
Speech disorder is one of the most common problems found with the autistic children.
The problems related to the speech of the autistic children have a wide range of varieties
including non-response, low voice, uttering of irrelevant words, repeating sentences, lack of
the sense of turn taking etc. We have made a hierarchy of speaking skills and suggested
corresponding games for each stage to achieve necessary level of e ciency. From the
observations of the already existing literatures, it is proved that the autistic children
pay more attention to the computer screen than to human face. Further, the attention
span and intensity are much greater for playing any type of game, rather than watching
a non-interactive event. Hence, a motivation toward using this attention to develop
certain skills in autistic children was achieved. With that motivation, we address the
communication issues of the autistic children and try to improve their socialization process
through interactive computer games. Speech, being the prime medium of communication,
comes to our attention rst. In this thesis, we have developed a number of computer games
to develop a better speech of the autistic children. Further, we analysed the speech of the
autistic children and automatically detected turns from their speech. The performances
of our games were checked against the real dataset developed while working with the
children of Autism Welfare Foundation (AWF). Both the quantitative analysis and the
qualitative feedback from the parents and the teachers, our games were proved to be an
e ective tool for helping the autistic children in their speech development.
