Severe or profound deafness in hearing
impaired children, can curb their ability to speak due to the lack of auditory
feedback. There has been a considerable attempt in developing commercial speech
training aids for such children which give feedback of acoustic and
articulatory parameters. Speech training aids based on visual feedback of vocal
tract shape (VTS) are reported to be useful for the improvement in speech production.
Since realistic VTS estimation for adult speakers and their validation has
already been done successfully, VTS estimation is now necessarily required in
case of children too, so that they get trained in speech at an early age. The
investigation on vocal tract shape estimation based on LPC analysis of speech
by appropriately selecting some of the algorithm parameters such as vocal tract
length, LPC order, and speech sampling rate has been done in our previous work.
This paper attempts to validate the obtained results for vocal tract shapes
corresponding to certain recorded vowels from children belonging to specific
age groups. Since MRI images of VTS are unavailable for articulating children,
validation of our results is based on the results from researchers who have
used other indirect techniques to obtain VTS.
Cite this paper
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