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Automatic Evaluation of Soft Articulatory Contact for Stuttering Treatment

Keiko Ochi, Koichi Mori, Naomi Sakai

We describe a new method for the automatic discrimination and evaluation of phonation beginning with a consonant with soft articulatory contact, which is used in the treatment of stuttering and normal phonation. Soft articulatory contact is trained to relax articulators and remove hard contacts that occur during stuttering. We use features related to the changes in acoustic characteristics and the voice quality under the hypothesis that the slowing down of articulatory movement of the initial consonant and the relaxing of phonatory muscles co-occur with soft articulatory contact. The results of an experimental evaluation showed that high accuracy was obtained when acoustic features were related to the peaks of the first derivative of the mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) corresponded to the slowing down of the movement of the articulators. The features of vocal quality only slightly contributed to the classification.