Processing of speech signals for physical and sensory disabilities.

Abstract

Assistive technology involving voice communication is used primarily by people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or who have speech and/or language disabilities. It is also used to a lesser extent by people with visual or motor disabilities. A very wide range of devices has been developed for people with hearing loss. These devices can be categorized not only by the modality of stimulation [i.e., auditory, visual, tactile, or direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve (auditory-neural)] but also in terms of the degree of speech processing that is used. At least four such categories can be distinguished: assistive devices (a) that are not designed specifically for speech, (b) that take the average characteristics of speech into account, (c) that process articulatory or phonetic characteristics of speech, and (d) that embody some degree of automatic speech recognition. Assistive devices for people with speech and/or language disabilities typically involve some form of speech synthesis or symbol generation for severe forms of language disability. Speech synthesis is also used in text-to-speech systems for sightless persons.

Fidelity of Automatic Speech Processing for Adult and Child Talker Classifications

“…Preliminary work in speech recognition began in the 1960s, with talker-independent automatic speech recognition and ASP work gaining a foothold by in the 1980s [ 1 ] and the first attempt at child speech not coming until the mid-1990s [ 2 , 3 ]. The majority of the literature considers ASP as it is applied to healthy adult speech, although there has been some attention to the application of ASP with child speech [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ] and disordered populations [ 8 , 9 ]. One ASP system used with children and disordered children is the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA; LENA Research Foundation, Boulder, CO).…”

The Benefit Obtained from Visually Displayed Text from an Automatic Speech Recognizer During Listening to Speech Presented in Noise

“…Several studies have stressed the potential of ASR systems to improve speech comprehension by people who experience communication problems because of hearing impairments (e.g., Kurzweil, 1999;Levitt, 1995;Woodcock, 1997). Referring to a display containing a transcription of the speech content could enable listeners to fill in parts of the auditory information that they do not hear.…”

A Historical Perspective on Digital Hearing Aids: How Digital Technology Has Changed Modern Hearing Aids

“…The array processor digital hearing aid developed at the City University of New York 48 was working in the summer of 1982 and was used for more than a decade in a series of experiments investigating the capabilities of DSP in a hearing aid. [50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66]69 Although not wearable, it was the first digital hearing aid in regular use as a research tool. A prototype wearable digital hearing aid was developed by Nunley et al in 1983.…”