Title: Quantifying speech signal of deaf speakers with territory specific utterances to understand the acoustic characteristics

Authors: J. Nirmaladevi; K. Bommanna Raja

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Excel Engineering College, Komarapalayam 637 303, Tamilnadu, India ' Centre for System Design and Information Processing, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore 641 407, Tamilnadu, India

Abstract: Hearing loss, deafness, hard of hearing and hearing impairment are the various terms used in the deaf community as a condition for inability to hear either partial or total impairment. The hearing loss in most of the deaf persons affects the language development to lead a normal life. The acoustic characteristic of deaf speaker is estimated in comparison with the normal speakers to create an assistive method. The speech signals are procured from the 32 territory-specific normal and deaf speakers by uttering ten Tamil words. The parameters analysed are pitch, formants, jitter and shimmer. From the overall results, it is observed that acoustic characteristics differ significantly for the deaf speakers and the quantitative values of the parameters are controlled by the normal speakers. Further the acoustic parameters may be used as a correction factor for the deaf speech signal such that the listeners can understand the deaf speech.

Keywords: deaf speaker; hard of hearing; deaf speech processing; assistive mechanism for deaf speaker; speech synthesisation; speech signal processing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBET.2018.089970

International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, 2018 Vol.26 No.3/4, pp.365 - 375

Received: 08 Mar 2017
Accepted: 17 Jul 2017
Published online: 26 Feb 2018 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article