There are established tests covering various aspects that are used to assess language skills in children before they start school. The SETK test (SprachEntwicklungsTest für Kinder – Language Development Test for Children) is used to measure speech comprehension (receptive), speech production (productive) and speech memory (auditory memory). The H-LAD (Heidelberger Lautdifferenzierungstest – Heidelberg Phoneme Discrimination Test) focuses on identifying phoneme discrimination errors. TROG-D is designed to test a child’s comprehension of grammar and examines their understanding of morphological-syntactic structures, particularly in German.

The aim here is to automatically evaluate the results of these tests and then deduce emerging language difficulties. The evaluation takes place using audio recordings taking into account the respective test. The main requirement for this is a reliable speech recognition system that can process the variable speech of children.