A prosthesis for speech sound disorders

Abstract

We have developed a prosthetic device for speech sound disorders based on our earlier vocaltract model. The proposed device mainly consists of a mouth piece, lip plates, and imitation tongue. We first estimated the vocal-tract area functions, particularly when the tongue is at the resting position and when it is raised up. We then tested the output sounds produced by a human speaker using the device with different configurations of the imitation tongue and open/close gestures of the lip plate. The results showed that, while the prosthetic device produced sounds of only moderate quality, the phrases became more intelligible.