TITLE:
Analysis of Deaf Speakers’ Speech Signal for Understanding the Acoustic Characteristics by Territory Specific Utterances
AUTHORS:
Nirmaladevi Jaganathan, Bommannaraja Kanagaraj
KEYWORDS:
Deaf Speaker, Hard of Hearing, Deaf Speech Processing, Assistive Mechanism for Deaf Speaker, Speech Correction, Speech Signal Processing
JOURNAL NAME:
Circuits and Systems,
Vol.7 No.8,
June
17,
2016
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 tenIndian native Tamil
language words. The speech parameters like pitch, formants, signal-to-noiseratio, energy, intensity, jitter and
shimmer are analyzed. From the results, it has been observedthat 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 theinformative part of speech in a normal
and deaf speakers may be identified using the acousticfeatures. In addition, these
attributes may be used for differential corrections of deaf speaker’sspeech signal and facilitate listeners
to understand the conveyed information.