Speech exemplar and evaluation database (SEED) for clinical training in articulatory phonetics and speech science

One challenge faced by teachers of phonetics, speech science, and clinical speech disorders courses is providing meaningful instruction that closes the theory to practice gap. One barrier to providing this type of deep learning experience is the lack of publicly available examples of speech recordings that illustrate comparisons between typical and disordered speech production across a broad range of disorder populations. Data of this type exist, but are typically collected for specific research projects under narrowly written IRB protocols that do not allow for release of even de-identified speech recordings to other investigators or teachers. As a partial corrective to this problem, we have developed an approved publicly available database of speech recordings that provides illustrative examples of adult and child speech production from individuals with and without speech disorders. The recorded speech materials were designed to illustrate important clinical concepts, and the recordings were collected under controlled conditions using high-quality equipment. The ultimate goal of creating this corpus is to improve practitioners' and scientists' understanding of the scientific bases of knowledge in our profession and improve our ability to develop clinical scientists and young researchers in the field.