Robust Automatic Evaluation of Intelligibility in Voice Rehabilitation Using Prosodic Analysis

Speech intelligibility for voice rehabilitation has been successfully evaluated by automatic prosodic analysis. In this paper, the influence of reading errors and the selection of certain words for the computation of prosodic features (nouns only, nouns and verbs, beginning of each sentence, beginnings of sentences and subclauses) are examined. 73 hoarse patients (48.3 ± 16.8 years) read the German version of the text “The North Wind and the Sun”. Their intelligibility was evaluated perceptually by 5 trained experts according to a 5-point scale. Eight prosodic features showed human-machine correlations of r \(\ge \) 0.4. The normalized energy in a word-pause-word interval, computed from all words (r = 0.69 for the full speaker set), the mean of jitter in nouns and verbs (r = 0.67), and the pause duration before a word (r = 0.66) were the most robust features. However, reading errors can significantly influence these results.

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