Automatic Rating of Hoarseness by Text-based Cepstral and Prosodic Evaluation

The standard for the analysis of distorted voices is perceptual rating of read-out texts or spontaneous speech. Automatic voice evaluation, however, is usually done on stable sections of sustained vowels. In this paper, text-based and established vowel-based analysis are compared with respect to their ability to measure hoarseness and its subclasses. 73 hoarse patients (48.3±16.8 years) uttered the vowel /e/ and read the German version of the text “The North Wind and the Sun”. Five speech therapists and physicians rated roughness, breathiness, and hoarseness according to the German RBH evaluation scheme. The best human-machine correlations were obtained for measures based on the Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP; up to |r | = 0.73). Support Vector Regression (SVR) on CPP-based measures and prosodic features improved the results further to r ≈0.8 and confirmed that automatic voice evaluation should be performed on a text recording

Pediatric cochlear implantation: an update

Deafness in pediatric age can adversely impact language acquisition as well as educational and social-emotional development. Once diagnosed, hearing loss should be rehabilitated early; the goal is to provide the child with maximum access to the acoustic features of speech within a listening range that is safe and comfortable. In presence of severe to profound deafness, benefit from auditory amplification cannot be enough to allow a proper language development. Cochlear implants are partially implantable electronic devices designed to provide profoundly deafened patients with hearing sensitivity within the speech range. Since their introduction more than 30 years ago, cochlear implants have improved their performance to the extent that are now considered to be standard of care in the treatment of children with severe to profound deafness. Over the years patient candidacy has been expanded and the criteria for implantation continue to evolve within the paediatric population. The minimum age for implantation has progressively reduced; it has been recognized that implantation at a very early age (12–18 months) provides children with the best outcomes, taking advantage of sensitive periods of auditory development. Bilateral implantation offers a better sound localization, as well as a superior ability to understand speech in noisy environments than unilateral cochlear implant. Deafened children with special clinical situations, including inner ear malformation, cochlear nerve deficiency, cochlear ossification, and additional disabilities can be successfully treated, even thogh they require an individualized candidacy evaluation and a complex post-implantation rehabilitation. Benefits from cochlear implantation include not only better abilities to hear and to develop speech and language skills, but also improved academic attainment, improved quality of life, and better employment status. Cochlear implants permit deaf people to hear, but they have a long way to go before their performance being comparable to that of the intact human ear; researchers are looking for more sophisticated speech processing strategies as well as a more efficient coupling between the electrodes and the cochlear nerve with the goal of dramatically improving the quality of sound of the next generation of implants

Multi-band dysperiodicity analyses of disordered connected speech

The objective is to analyse vocal dysperiodicities in connected speech produced by dysphonic speakers. The analysis involves a variogram-based method that enables tracking instantaneous vocal dysperiodicities. The dysperiodicity trace is summarized by means of the signal-to-dysperiodicity ratio, which has been shown to correlate strongly with the perceived degree of hoarseness of the speaker. Previously, this method has been evaluated on small corpora only. In this article, analyses have been carried out on two corpora comprising over 250 and 700 speakers. This has enabled carrying out multi-frequency band and multi-cue analyses without risking overfitting. The analysis results are compared to the cepstral peak prominence, which is a popular cue that indirectly summarizes vocal dysperiodicities frame-wise. A perceptual rating has been available for the first corpus whereas speakers in the second corpus have been categorized as normal or pathological only. For the first corpus, results show that the correlation with perceptual scores increases statistically significantly for multi-band analysis compared to conventional full-band analysis. Also, combining the cepstral peak prominence with the low-frequency band signal-to-dysperiodicity ratio statistically significantly increases their combined correlation with perceptual scores. The signal-to-dysperiodicity ratios of the two corpora have been separately submitted to principal component analysis. The results show that the first two principal components are interpretable in terms of the degree of dysphonia and the spectral slope, respectively. The clinical relevance of the principal components has been confirmed by linear discriminant analysis. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe