EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing
Volume 2005 (2005), Issue 9, Pages 1400-1409
doi:10.1155/ASP.2005.1400

Disordered Speech Assessment Using Automatic Methods Based on Quantitative Measures

Lingyun Gu,1 John G. Harris,1 Rahul Shrivastav,2 and Christine Sapienza2

1Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville 32611-6200, FL, USA
2Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Florida, Gainesville 32611, FL, USA

Received 2 November 2003; Revised 6 August 2004

Copyright © 2005 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Speech quality assessment methods are necessary for evaluating and documenting treatment outcomes of patients suffering from degraded speech due to Parkinson's disease, stroke, or other disease processes. Subjective methods of speech quality assessment are more accurate and more robust than objective methods but are time-consuming and costly. We propose a novel objective measure of speech quality assessment that builds on traditional speech processing techniques such as dynamic time warping (DTW) and the Itakura-Saito (IS) distortion measure. Initial results show that our objective measure correlates well with the more expensive subjective methods.