Validation of Optimum Algorithm Parameters Required to Estimate Vocal Tract Shape for Children Using LPC Analysis

Abstract

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.