Speech therapy app uses biofeedback

A new app called staRt aims to help people learn speech skills, such as pronouncing the “r” sound, through biofeedback.

Has someone ever corrected the way you said a word? You reply with another attempt, only to be corrected again. Frustration mounts as you struggle to hear nuanced differences between the speaker’s pronunciation and your own.

A similar experience often occurs for children in speech therapy who are trying to mimic proposed words. In some cases, a child can get stuck trying to perfect an “r” sound over the course of months or even years.

To address these challenges, Tara McAllister, associate professor at New York University Steinhardt, and colleagues created the staRt app. Biofeedback uses instrumentation to create a visual display of some aspect of body function, such as heart rate or speech acoustics. As director of BITS Lab, McAllister has conducted multiple studies on biofeedback for speech, including studies in which an ultrasound probe held beneath the chin allows users to see how they position their tongues during speech.

With the staRt app, a cheerful starfish prompts users to speak in order to see their own sounds as ocean waves that move as the user talks. Since its launch in 2020 on the App Store, staRt has been downloaded more than 9,000 times.

Here, McAllister talks about the creation of staRt, its influence on the practice of speech therapy, and the other ways speech visualization can benefit language learning: