Abstract
An important concern with the deaf community is inability to hear partially or totally. This may affect the development of language during childhood, which limits their habitual existence. Consequently to facilitate such deaf speakers through certain assistive mechanism, an effort has been taken to understand the acoustic characteristics of deaf speakers by evaluating the territory specific utterances. Speech signals are acquired from 32 normal and 32 deaf speakers by uttering ten Indian native Tamil language words. The speech parameters like pitch, formants, signal-to-noise ratio, energy, intensity, jitter and shimmer are analyzed. From the results, it has been observed that the acoustic characteristics of deaf speakers differ significantly and their quantitative measure dominates the normal speakers for the words considered. The study also reveals that the informative part of speech in a normal and deaf speakers may be identified using the acoustic features. In addition, these attributes may be used for differential corrections of deaf speaker’s speech signal and facilitate listeners to understand the conveyed information.
Highlights
Speech is the strongest communication medium for all human beings, while it becomes hardest for deaf speakersHow to cite this paper: Jaganathan, N. and Kanagaraj, B. (2016) Analysis of Deaf Speakers’ Speech Signal for Understanding the Acoustic Characteristics by Territory Specific Utterances
The normal speakers (NS) group pitch value ranges between 263.97 ± 34.06 Hz and for deaf speaker it is between 413.95 ± 19.05 Hz for deaf speaker, which is higher in frequency
The deviation between the NS and DS groups for the mean pitch values is 149.98 Hz, which states that the deaf speakers pitch value starts at a higher value compared to a normal speaker
Summary
Speech is the strongest communication medium for all human beings, while it becomes hardest for deaf speakersHow to cite this paper: Jaganathan, N. and Kanagaraj, B. (2016) Analysis of Deaf Speakers’ Speech Signal for Understanding the Acoustic Characteristics by Territory Specific Utterances. Speech is the strongest communication medium for all human beings, while it becomes hardest for deaf speakers. (2016) Analysis of Deaf Speakers’ Speech Signal for Understanding the Acoustic Characteristics by Territory Specific Utterances. Kanagaraj or hard of hearing subjects (HoH). This communication medium should sustain, preserve and prolong in its quality to convey their thoughts [1]. The amount of hearing loss ranges from moderate to profound to severe and measured in decibel (dB). The profound to severe hearing loss of ≥70 dB occurs because of congenital facts and becomes complex to understand the acoustics as well as verbalization phonetics. The speech output of deaf speakers is less intelligible and it is difficult for the listeners to understand the content of articulation. The acoustic characteristics to greater extent can be comprehended with available speech analyzing techniques [2]-[4] to contemplate for the posed problem
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