Machine learning could automate screening kids for speech and language disorders

Screening for language disorders is best done early and often, but it's not always easy to get the equipment and staff to every kid in a timely fashion. At least a basic level of screening, however, may soon be able to be automated or done at home, if research out of MIT proves reliable. Computer scientists from the school discussed a new technique at the Interspeech conference in San Francisco; it's still very early in development, but it's more than a little promising. The system created by grad student Jen Gong and professor John Guttag uses recordings of many such performances as data for a machine learning system. By closely analyzing this dataset, it learns what patterns are associated with typical development and which suggest a nascent speech or language disorder -- patterns corroborated by previous research, it bears mentioning. It's not a replacement for a trained professional, but then again, a trained professional can't be packed into an app.