Boyce, S. E., Balvalli, S. N., MacAuslan, J., Clark, J. C., Martin, D.
Typical speakers instinctively use a ‚CLEAR‛ speaking style when they are instructed to ‚speak as if your listener is hearing impaired‛ or ‚speak as if your listener is not a native speaker of your language‛. CLEAR speech is more intelligible to hearing impaired listeners by about 17% (1, 2, 3). The ability to automatically detect differences between a speaker’s ordinary speech patterns and their most intelligible speech, would clearly be helpful in clinical training and telemedicine applications.
Here we describe, a Landmark-based computer program (4, 5) to detect articulatory differences between ‚CLEAR‛ and ‚CONVERSATIONAL‛ styles of speech. Landmark-based speech analysis takes advantage of the fact that important articulatory events, like voicing, frication etc. show characteristic patterns of abrupt change in the speech signal. These patterns are detected by an automated computer system and assigned to a particular type of Landmark.