European Conference on Speech Technology Edinburgh, Scotland, UK September 1987

Artificial Corrections to Deaf Speech and the Development of Visual Speech Training Aids

B. Maassen (1), N. Arends (2), D. Povel (2)

(1) Inst. Medical Psych., Univ.Hospital Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
(2) Dep. of Exp. Psych., Nijmegen, The Netherlands

The causes of the (low) intelligibility of deaf speech were studied, following a so called "Speech Transformation Method". By manipulation of analysis parameters, errors of articulation, intonation and timing, that occurred in sentences spoken by deaf children, were artificially corrected one-by-one. Intelligibility tests showed that suprasegmental corrections caused only a small improvement (from 24% to 34% word-intelligibility), whereas segmental correction increased intelligibility scores to 74%. The results of this study formed one of the starting points for a research project aiming at the development of a visual speech training aid: a device that supplies visual information on the acoustic quality of deaf speech.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Maassen, B. / Arends, N. / Povel, D. (1987): "Artificial corrections to deaf speech and the development of visual speech training aids", In ECST-1987, 1415-1418.