Child ASR Adaptation with Adult Retention: An Empirical Study

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2610.08827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems often underperform for children and non-native speakers, while adapting adult ASR models to child speech can cause adult-speech forgetting. We study child ASR adaptation with adult retention across Arabic and English. We compare full fine-tuning, LoRA, and post-hoc weight-space merging across encoder--decoder, encoder--CTC, and AudioLLM-based ASR systems. Experiments use Arabic native and non-native child speech, English MyST child speech, and adult benchmarks from MGB-2 and LibriSpeech test-clean. We evaluate recognition quality with WER and quantify the adaptation--retention trade-off using Retention Index, Child Adaptation Gain, and Adaptation Recovery. Results show that child adaptation is necess