Aligning Stuttered-Speech Research with End-User Needs: Scoping Review, Survey, and Guidelines

TL;DR

This paper reviews current stuttered speech research, surveys stakeholders, and offers guidelines to better align future work with end-user needs in speech technology.

Contribution

It provides a taxonomy of stuttered speech research, highlights gaps between research and user needs, and proposes concrete guidelines for future work.

Findings

Current speech recognition systems underperform on stuttered speech.

Research priorities often do not reflect stakeholder needs.

Guidelines are proposed to better address the community's real needs.

Abstract

Atypical speech is receiving greater attention in speech technology research, but much of this work unfolds with limited interdisciplinary dialogue. For stuttered speech in particular, it is widely recognised that current speech recognition systems fall short in practice, and current evaluation methods and research priorities are not systematically grounded in end-user experiences and needs. In this work, we analyse these gaps through 1) a scoping review of papers that deal with stuttered speech and 2) a survey of 70 stakeholders, including adults who stutter and speech-language pathologists. By analysing these two perspectives, we propose a taxonomy of stuttered-speech research, identify where current research directions diverge from the needs articulated by stakeholders, and conclude by outlining concrete guidelines and directions towards addressing the real needs of the stuttering community.