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Say Less: A Child-Speech Screener Designed to Stop Before Diagnosis

TL;DR for operators The paper presents a narrowly scoped screening pipeline for detecting common Polish sibilant substitutions in children.1 It does not attempt to transcribe unrestricted speech, diagnose a speech sound disorder, or replace a speech-language pathologist. That restraint is not an apology. It is the architecture. The system works by preserving non-canonical pronunciations as explicit tokens, aligning them against a known prompted pronunciation, converting the difference into a structured error description, and allowing a caregiver-facing assistant to speak only through clinician-reviewable templates. ...

July 15, 2026 · 19 min · Zelina