Automatic detection of pharyngeal fricative in cleft palate speech

Abstract

Pharyngeal fricative occurs during the production of consonants, which makes the consonants lose or weaken in cleft palate speech. In clinical application, the automatic detection of pharyngeal fricative in cleft palate speech could provide objective and effective assistant aids for speech language pathologists. In this paper, a novel acoustic parameter is proposed to detect the existence of pharyngeal fricative in cleft palate speech. This proposed acoustic feature ICPD (Independent Consonant Prominent Distribution) reflects the movement of mouth and tongue. The experimental results show that normal fricative has the higher ICPD. The extracted ICPD feature is combined with k-nearest neighbor classifier to achieve the automatic detection of pharyngeal fricative. The proposed system is tested on 127 speech samples recorded by cleft palate patients and 94 by normal speakers of controls. The overall pharyngeal fricative detection accuracy is around 90%.