Vowel & diphthong tutors for language therapy

The present paper describes the application called ICATIANI, developed to aid hearing impaired children in the acquisition of speech The system supports the practice of vowels, diphthong and basic vocabulary. An animated character "Baldi" pronounces slowly and asks the student to speak, and if the utterance is correctly recognized, Baldi smiles otherwise he makes a sad face and asks the child to try again. A speech recognizer is used to evaluate the pronunciation of the words. Tests were performed to assess the children\´s pronunciation and progress. Last year some improvement was detected and now not only hearing impaired children but also children with intellectual disabilities are trying out the system. This paper presents the advances and the results so far, as well as experiences of the applying speech technology to support language acquisition for children in a public school in Mexico.