No abstract

An experiment was carried out to determine whether the level of the speech fluency disorder can be estimated by means of automatic acoustic measurements. These measures analyze, for example, the amount of silence in a recording or the number of abrupt spectral changes in a speech signal. All the measures were designed to take into account symptoms of stuttering. In the experiment, 118 audio recordings of read speech by Czech native speakers were employed. The results indicate that the human-made rating of the speech fluency disorder in read speech can be predicted on the basis of automatic measurements. The number of abrupt spectral changes in the speech segments turns out to be the most appropriate measure to describe the overall speech performance. The results also imply that there are measures with good results describing partial symptoms (especially fixed postures without audible airflow).

The paper describes experiments where automatic acoustic algorithms initially intended to be used on Czech stuttering speakers were applied on recordings of German stuttering speakers. Four algorithms based on voice activity and abrupt spectral changes detection are introduced. The database consists of 34 speakers. The measure, the number of abrupt spectral changes in speech segments, reached a correlation with fluency rating of 0.85. The other measures have also good agreement with subjective evaluation. Results indicate that it could be basically possible to do language-independent analysis of stuttering, here demonstrated on read recordings of German speakers.