A Method of Evaluating Korean Articulation Quality for Rehabilitation of Articulation Disorder in Children

Abstract

Articulation disorders are characterized by an inability to achieve clear pronunciation due to misuse of the articulators. In this paper, a method of detecting such disorders by comparing to the standard pronunciations is proposed. This method defines the standard pronunciations from the speeches of normal children by clustering them with three features which are the Linear Predictive Cepstral Coefficient (LPCC), the Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC), and the Relative Spectral Analysis Perceptual Linear Prediction (RASTA-PLP). By calculating the distance between the centroid of the standard pronunciation and the inputted pronunciation, disordered speech whose features locates outside the cluster is detected. 89 children (58 of normal children and 31 of children with disorders) were recruited. 35 U-TAP test words were selected and each word's standard pronunciation is made from normal children and compared to each pronunciation of children with disorders. In the experiments, the pronunciations with disorders were successfully distinguished from the standard pronunciations.