Estimation of Paralinguistic Features and Quality Analysis of Alaryngeal Voice

This research focuses on the analysis of speech produced by a prosthetic device implanted in laryngectomees and the comparison of its paralinguistic features with that of a normal voice. Acoustic analysis was done using fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, and intensity. The study included eight males and the results indicated that the alaryngeal speech has values closer to natural voice in features like jitter, shimmer, pitch, and intensity. The harmonics-to-noise ratio of alaryngeal voice was slightly lower than that of normal voice. The formants and bandwidth were higher than that of normal voice. The study implies that though the alaryngeal voice is a pseudo voice produced by a speech aid (Blom-singer), it can produce a voice as close to the natural voice as possible and observations indicate that the pronunciations produced are as natural as the voice produced by the vocal cords.