Development of speech trainer for the patients wearing maxillary prosthesis

1992 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 03454451
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: 補綴理工系歯学
• Research Institution: Ohu university (1992); Iwate Medical University (1991)
• Principal Investigator: SEINO Kazuo School of Dentistry, Ohu University, Professor, 歯学部, 教授 (90048546)
• Project Period (FY): 1991 – 1992
• Keywords: Maxillary defect / Maxillary prosthesis / Linear prediction equation / Voice / PARCOR coefficient / Speech trainer

Research Abstract

In order to rehabilitate those patients wearing maxillary prosthesis back to normal standards as soon as possible, a new method of speech training was developed by way of trial. This new system enables one to distinguish certain vowels and plosives using the partial auto-correlation (PARCOR) method, that is based on a linear prediction equation. Acoustic parameters indicated by the PARCOR coefficient can recognize the part where transition from the frontal consonant to the following vowel has taken place. This procedure involves the following steps; (1) each vowel sound is first discriminated by monosyllable pattern matching to reduce the count to 1/5 the size, (2) the phoneme having maximum resemblance to the spoken monosyllable is selected and recorded. The analyzed data comprises 25 vowels and 305 consonants for discriminating vowel, and 130 plosive sounds for recognition of frontal consonants from 5 male speakers.
Results showed the recognition rates of the vowels and plosives to be 95.4% and 78.5% respectively on the average. Thus, this new system showed that it could be as an important speech analyzer to aid in training and developing speech therapy.