mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Speech Recognition for Automatically Assessing Afrikaans and isiXhosa Preschool Oral Narratives

arXiv 2501.06478 ↗First posted 11 Jan 2025eess.AS cs.CL cs.SDcited by 4

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Abstract (arXiv)

We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of prior child-speech ASR strategies to determine which is best suited to this unique setting. Using Whisper and only 5 minutes of transcribed in-domain child speech, we find that additional in-domain adult data (adult speech matching the story domain) provides the biggest improvement, especially when coupled with voice conversion. Semi-supervised learning also helps for both languages, while parameter-efficient fine-tuning helps on Afrikaans but not on isiXhosa (which is under-represented in the Whisper model). Few child-speech studies look at non-English data, and even fewer at the preschool ages of 4 and 5. Our work therefore represents a unique validation of a wide range of previous child-speech ASR strategies in an under-explored setting.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 13 of its 46 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2025.

Builds on

13 of 46 references.

References · 13

  1. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,084
  2. 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 3,972
  3. 2021XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scalecited by 589
  4. 2023Voice Conversion With Just Nearest Neighborscited by 67
  5. 2024LoRA-Whisper: Parameter-Efficient and Extensible Multilingual ASRcited by 35
  6. 2024Benchmarking Children's ASR with Supervised and Self-supervised Speech Foundation Modelscited by 29
  7. 2018Transfer Learning from Adult to Children for Speech Recognition: Evaluation, Analysis and Recommendationscited by 21
  8. 2020Semi-Supervised Learning with Data Augmentation for End-to-End ASRcited by 19
  9. 2023Sparsely Shared LoRA on Whisper for Child Speech Recognitioncited by 18
  10. 2021Voice Conversion Can Improve ASR in Very Low-Resource Settingscited by 13
  11. 2024Improving child speech recognition with augmented child-like speechcited by 7
  12. 2021Low Resource German ASR with Untranscribed Data Spoken by Non-native Children -- INTERSPEECH 2021 Shared Task SPAPL Systemcited by 4
1 more
  1. 2023Voice Conversion for Stuttered Speech, Instruments, Unseen Languages and Textually Described Voicescited by 4

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 1.

4 papers.

  1. 2025Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for African Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 2
  2. 2025Towards few-shot isolated word reading assessmentcited by 1
  3. 2025Automatically assessing oral narratives of Afrikaans and isiXhosa childrencited by 1
  4. 2026T-SANDHI: Tone Sandhi-aware Adaptive Network with Decoupled Hybrid Injection for Low-resource Taiwanese Hokkien Speech Recognitioncited by 0