Analysis of Deaf Speakers’ Speech Signal for Understanding the Acoustic Characteristics by Territory Specific Utterances

Abstract

An important concern with the deaf community is inability to hear partially or totally. This may affect the development of language during childhood, which limits their habitual existence. Consequently to facilitate such deaf speakers through certain assistive mechanism, an effort has been taken to understand the acoustic characteristics of deaf speakers by evaluating the territory specific utterances. Speech signals are acquired from 32 normal and 32 deaf speakers by uttering ten Indian native Tamil language words. The speech parameters like pitch, formants, signal-to-noise ratio, energy, intensity, jitter and shimmer are analyzed. From the results, it has been observed that the acoustic characteristics of deaf speakers differ significantly and their quantitative measure dominates the normal speakers for the words considered. The study also reveals that the informative part of speech in a normal and deaf speakers may be identified using the acoustic features. In addition, these attributes may be used for differential corrections of deaf speaker’s speech signal and facilitate listeners to understand the conveyed information.