Investigating voice function characteristics of Greek speakers with hearing loss using automatic glottal source feature extraction
(Oral presentation)
| Anna Sfakianaki (University of Crete, Greece), George P. Kafentzis (University of Crete, Greece) |
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The current study investigates voice quality characteristics of Greek adults with normal hearing and hearing loss, automatically obtained from glottal inverse filtering analysis using the Aalto Aparat toolkit. Aalto Aparat has been employed in glottal flow analysis of disordered speech, but to the best of the authors’ knowledge, not as yet in hearing impaired voice analysis and assessment. Five speakers, three women and two men, with normal hearing (NH) and five speakers with prelingual profound hearing impairment (HI), matched for age and sex, produced symmetrical /ˈpVpV/ disyllables, where V=/i, a, u/. A state-of-the-art method named quasi-closed phase analysis (QCP) is offered in Aparat and it is used to estimate the glottal source signal. Glottal source features were obtained using time- and frequency-domain parametrization methods and analysed statistically. The interpretation of the results attempts to shed light on potential differences between HI and NH phonation strategies, while advantages and limitations of inverse filtering methods in HI voice assessment are discussed.
