Teaching Intelligible Speech to the Autistic Children by Interactive Computer Games Mirfat Akter Sharmin, Md. Mizanur Rahman, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Md. Mustafizur Rahman, S. M. Ferdous Department of Computer Science and Engineering Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) Dhaka-1000, Bangladesh. E-mail: mirfat0712@gmail.com, mazy_buet@yahoo.com, ishtiaque@csebuet.org, nahidcse05@gmail.com, ferdous.csebuet@gmail.com ABSTRACT Autism is considered to be a disorder of neural development which affects about 1 in every 150 kids. Specifically, some children with ASD are not fortunate enough to acquire the ability to communicate in their own language. Since speech is an important media of communication, socialization, and interaction with the world, these children need assistance while delivering speech to communicate to the world. Without proper speaking skills, these autistic children face difficulties in expressing their needs and emotions, too. Doctors, therapists, and special teachers usually help kids with autism to overcome many difficulties. However, the traditional methods of teaching clear speech to the autistic children suffer from being monotonous, laborious and not successful in many cases. Hence, we developed an interactive computer game which will be helpful to increase intelligibility in autistic children. During our five months of intervention with the autistic children of Autism Welfare Foundation (AWF) at Dhaka, we checked the effectiveness of this therapy and got some encouraging results. Categories and Subject Descriptors J.3 [Life and Medical Sciences]: Health; J.4 [Social and Behavioral Sciences]: Psychology I.2.1 [Applications and Expert Systems]: Medicine and Science General Terms e-Learning, Autism, Experimentation, and Human Factors. Keywords Autism, e-Learning, Educational Games, and Human Factors. 1. INTRODUCTION Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are a group of neurodevelopment disorders characterized by core deficits in three domains: social interaction, communication, and repetitive or stereotypic behavior. People suffering from autism very often demonstrate a poor performance in social interactions. These problems are frequently seen in their speeches and physical gestures. Due to the abnormal cerebral structure, the thinking pattern of the autistic children is quite different from the neurotypicals. They very often have a strong attraction to some particular persons, objects, tasks, places or environments. During our intervention for more than five months with the autistic children at Autism Welfare Foundation (AWF) located at Dhaka, Bangladesh, we observed this important feature among most of them. Some autistic children were found be attracted by the underwater objects, while some were found to be fond of vehicles or foods. Their attraction level is very intense and most of them do not feel comfortable if they are not dealing with something related to the things they like. Any effort on teaching an autistic child with something they are not interested in was proved to be unfruitful. Hence we found that the diversity in tastes should be considered with utmost care while designing a learning system for autistic children. There are many stages of speech and language problems. The stages are classified as (1) Non-Response, (2) Making Low Sounds in Response, (3) Making Unintelligible Sounds, (4) Making Delay in Answering Questions, (5) Answering Incorrectly with Articulate Words, (6) Difficulties in Making Correct Sentences with words, (7) Lacking the Sense of Turn Taking. In this paper we concentrate on the third stage stated above, Making Unintelligible Sounds. The term intelligibility refers to the proportion of a speaker's output that a listener can readily understand. Some of the autistic children suffer from speech intelligibility problem. Although they can sound loud enough, the audience cannot get the meaning of those. Actually, there is no cure for autism. But there are some way and therapy that can help an autistic child to develop from the constraints. Computer game has proved very powerful tool in this regard [1][2]. Rahman et al [3] have discussed the background of the research in this field and developed a fully computerized game for increasing clarity in the speech of the autistic children, but there are certain shortcomings of this methodology. First of all, the synonyms of any particular word which is not stored in computer database can be recognized as an error although the autistic child has pronounced the right name of the object shown in the computer screen. Another problem of that Gaming Software is the adaptability, an autistic children who is either performing better or worse the object selection process which is actually done Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SAC’11, March 21-25, 2011, TaiChung, Taiwan. Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0113-8/11/03…$10.00.