Automatic Evaluation of Soft Articulatory Contact for Stuttering Treatment

What is it about?

We describe a new method for the automatic discrimination and evaluation of phonation beginning with a consonant with soft articulatory contact, which is used in the treatment of stutter- ing, and normal phonation. Soft articulatory contact is trained to relax articulators and remove hard contacts that occur during stuttering. We use features related to the changes in acoustic characteristics and the voice quality under hypothesis that slow- ing down of articulatory movement of the initial consonant and relaxing of phonatory muscles co-occur with the soft articula- tory contact. The results of the experimental evaluation showed that high accuracy was obtained when acoustic features related to the peaks of the first derivative of the mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) correspondent to the slowing down of the movement of the articulators and the features of vocal quality only slightly contributed the classification.

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