Analysis of Hypernasal Speech in Children with Cleft Lip and Palate

In children with cleft lip and palate speech disorders appear often. One major disorder amongst them is hypernasality. This is the first study which shows that it is possible to automatically detect hypernasality in connected speech without any invasive means. Therefore, we investigated MFCCs and pronunciation features. The pronunciation features are computed from phoneme confusion probabilities. Furthermore, we examine frame level features based on the Teager Energy operator. The classification of hypernasal speech is performed with up to 66.6 % (CL) and 86.9 % (RR) on word level. On frame level rates of 62.3 % (CL) and 90.3 % (RR) are reached.