An Investigation of Vocal Tract Characteristics for Acoustic Discrimination of Pathological Voices
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2738.2013.758731.pdf
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1.81 MB
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90345b7a6fdd93db14fc2cc6ebcbe93e
Author(s)
Lee, Jung-Won
Kang, Hong-Goo
Son, Young-Ik
Choi, Jeung-Yoon Elizabeth
Date Issued
2013
Journal
BioMed Research International
Publisher
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Citation
Lee, Jung-Won, Hong-Goo Kang, Jeung-Yoon Choi, and Young-Ik Son. “An Investigation of Vocal Tract Characteristics for Acoustic Discrimination of Pathological Voices.” BioMed Research International 2013 (2013): 1–11.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This paper investigates the effectiveness of measures related to vocal tract characteristics in classifying normal and pathological speech. Unlike conventional approaches that mainly focus on features related to the vocal source, vocal tract characteristics are examined to determine if interaction effects between vocal folds and the vocal tract can be used to detect pathological speech. Especially, this paper examines features related to formant frequencies to see if vocal tract characteristics are affected by the nature of the vocal fold-related pathology. To test this hypothesis, stationary fragments of vowel /aa/ produced by 223 normal subjects, 472 vocal fold polyp subjects, and 195 unilateral vocal cord paralysis subjects are analyzed. Based on the acoustic-articulatory relationships, phonation for pathological subjects is found to be associated with measures correlated with a raised tongue body or an advanced tongue root. Vocal tract-related features are also found to be statistically significant from the Kruskal-Wallis test in distinguishing normal and pathological speech. Classification results demonstrate that combining the formant measurements with vocal fold-related features results in improved performance in differentiating vocal pathologies including vocal polyps and unilateral vocal cord paralysis, which suggests that measures related to vocal tract characteristics may provide additional information in diagnosing vocal disorders.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/758731
