background: since most clinical treatments of persian children’s language impairments are based on either the therapist, clinicians’ experiences (mostly), or english language norms (sometimes), comparing two minor indices of speech quality, namely “mean length of utterance” (mlu) and “mean length of five phrasal utterances” (mlfpu) between different age groups of children, would be unequivocall...

Wideband speech codecs usually provide better perceptual speech quality than their narrowband counterparts, but they still degrade quality compared to an uncoded transmission path. In order to quantify these degradations, a new methodology is presented which derives a one-dimensional quality index on the basis of instrumental measurements. This index can be used to rank different wideband speec...

The objective of this work is to represent the information in the speech signal picked up by a throat microphone (TM) in an efficient manner in terms of number of bits required. Since the TM signal is unaffected by ambient noise, it is possible to extract the required information effectively under different environmental conditions. A spectral mapping technique is proposed from the TM speech to...

In this paper, we define an F0 quantization scheme for a very low bit rate speech coder based on HMM (Hidden Markov Model). In the coding system, the encoder carries out phoneme recognition, and transmits phoneme indices, state durations and F0 information to the decoder. In the decoder, phoneme HMMs are concatenated according to the phoneme indices, and a sequence of mel-cepstral coefficient v...

While temporal envelope and fine-structure cues are known to be good predictors for speech intelligibility, it is not clear how well they are correlated with subjective quality ratings, particularly those using noise-suppressed speech. The present work evaluated the performance of two objective measures (i.e., NCM and TFSS), which were originally developed with primarily envelope or fine-struct...

In an HMM-based Text-To-Speech system, contextual features, including phonetic and prosodic factors have a significant influence to the spectrum, F0 and duration of the synthetic voice. This paper proposes prosodic features aiming at improving the naturalness of an HMM-based TTS system (VTed) for a tonal language, Vietnamese. The ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) features are used to learn two cru...

evaluation of voice quality parameters of esophageal speech in different neoglottis forms after total laryngectomy. methods: presentation of voice analysis of 20 patients, who underwent total laryngectomy. the success of acquiring this technique was estimated by means of a voice analyzing program (pitch, sound-holding, loudness, spectrogram), and by the intelligibility via the telephone. shape ...

the speech enhancement techniques are often employed to improve the quality and intelligibility of the noisy speech signals. this paper discusses a novel technique for speech enhancement which is based on singular value decomposition. this implementation utilizes a genetic algorithm based optimization method for reducing the effects of environmental noises from the singular vectors as well as t...

BACKGROUND/AIMS The aim of the present study is to construct a simple method for visualizing and quantifying the audibility of speech on the audiogram and to predict speech intelligibility. The proposed method involves a series of indices on the audiogram form reflecting the sound pressure level distribution of running speech. The indices that coincide with a patient's pure tone thresholds refl...