查看文章

The speech intelligibility of cleft palate (CP) individuals is degraded primarily due to compensatory articulation errors and hypernasality. The present work proposes a method to enhance the CP speech intelligibility, where fricatives are substituted by compensatory articulation errors. Apart from the distortion present in the sustained fricative region, the fricative-vowel and vowel-fricative regions are also deviated due to co-articulation effect. Since important perceptual cues are embedded in the transition regions. Therefore, it is necessary to enhance the transition regions for more intelligibility. Motivated by the perceptual significance of the transition regions, 2D-DCT based joint spectro-temporal features are exploited for the modification. The 2D-DCT coefficients of CP speech are modified by projecting them onto the singular vectors derived from the SVD analysis of normal speech. Further, for the evaluation of speech intelligibility, objective and subjective assessment is conducted. The results show significant improvement in the speech intelligibility of the modified speech.