Processing Phoneme Specific Segments for Cleft Lip and Palate Speech Enhancement

• Main Authors: Sudro, Protima Nomo, Sinha, Rohit, Prasanna, S. R. Mahadeva
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 02-10-2021
• Subjects: Computer Science - Sound; Quantitative Biology - Quantitative Methods
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2110.00794

The cleft lip and palate (CLP) speech intelligibility is distorted due to the
deformation in their articulatory system. For addressing the same, a few
previous works perform phoneme specific modification in CLP speech. In CLP
speech, both the articulation error and the nasalization distorts the
intelligibility of a word. Consequently, modification of a specific phoneme may
not always yield in enhanced entire word-level intelligibility. For such cases,
it is important to identify and isolate the phoneme specific error based on the
knowledge of acoustic events. Accordingly, the phoneme specific error
modification algorithms can be exploited for transforming the specified errors
and enhance the word-level intelligibility. Motivated by that, in this work, we
combine some of salient phoneme specific enhancement approaches and demonstrate
their effectiveness in improving the word-level intelligibility of CLP speech.
The enhanced speech samples are evaluated using subjective and objective
evaluation metrics.