Acoustic Features Associated with Sustained Vowel and Continuous Speech Productions by Chinese Children with Functional Articulation Disorders
Wang Zhang, Xiangquan Gui, Tianqi Wang, Manwa Ng, Feng Yang, Lan Wang and Nan Yan
Abstract:
Functional articulation disorder (FAD) is a speech disorder commonly found in preschoolers, negatively affecting their day-to-day communication and in the long run their psychological development. Current FAD research mainly focused on the perceptual aspects, but not other means such as acoustic and physiological analyses. The present study aimed to evaluate the different acoustic features associated with sustained vowels and continuous speech produced by children with FAD and their age-matched controls. Speech samples produced by 67 children with FAD and 30 typically developing children. Articulatory-acoustic vowel space features, including formant centralization ratio (FCR3), F1 range ratio (F1RR), F2 range ratio (F2RR) and triangular vowel space area (TVSA), were calculated using the first two formant frequencies from vowels /a/, /i/, /u/. Voice onset time (VOT) values associated with the stop consonants were also obtained. Results indicated that children with FAD exhibited articulatory undershooting with reduced range of articulatory movements, as well as poorer control over the release of oral occlusion when producing aspirated or unaspirated stops, when compared with normal counterparts. The findings support the notion that these acoustic features can be used to differentiate misarticulated speech from healthy speech and could be used to objectively classify and evaluate FAD speech.
Cite as: Zhang, W., Gui, X., Wang, T., Ng, M., Yang, F., Wang, L., Yan, N. (2018) Acoustic Features Associated with Sustained Vowel and Continuous Speech Productions by Chinese Children with Functional Articulation Disorders. Proc. Interspeech 2018, 1696-1700, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1521.
BiBTeX Entry:
@inproceedings{Zhang2018,
author={Wang Zhang and Xiangquan Gui and Tianqi Wang and Manwa Ng and Feng Yang and Lan Wang and Nan Yan},
title={Acoustic Features Associated with Sustained Vowel and Continuous Speech Productions by Chinese Children with Functional Articulation Disorders},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2018},
pages={1696--1700},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1521},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1521} }