Processing Phoneme Specific Segments for Cleft Lip and Palate Speech Enhancement

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to improve speech intelligibility in individuals with cleft lip and palate by identifying and modifying specific phoneme errors, combining enhancement techniques, and evaluating the improvements through subjective and objective metrics.

Contribution

It introduces a combined phoneme-specific enhancement approach tailored for CLP speech to improve word-level intelligibility, addressing limitations of previous methods.

Findings

Significant improvement in word-level intelligibility observed.

Enhanced speech quality validated by subjective and objective metrics.

Effective identification and modification of phoneme-specific errors.

Abstract

The cleft lip and palate (CLP) speech intelligibility is distorted due to the deformation in their articulatory system. For addressing the same, a few previous works perform phoneme specific modification in CLP speech. In CLP speech, both the articulation error and the nasalization distorts the intelligibility of a word. Consequently, modification of a specific phoneme may not always yield in enhanced entire word-level intelligibility. For such cases, it is important to identify and isolate the phoneme specific error based on the knowledge of acoustic events. Accordingly, the phoneme specific error modification algorithms can be exploited for transforming the specified errors and enhance the word-level intelligibility. Motivated by that, in this work, we combine some of salient phoneme specific enhancement approaches and demonstrate their effectiveness in improving the word-level intelligibility of CLP speech. The enhanced speech samples are evaluated using subjective and objective evaluation metrics.