Language-independent method for analysis of German stuttering recordings

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.