Thu-3-9-8 Spectral Moment and Duration of Burst of Plosives in Speech of Children with Hearing Impairment and Typically Developing Children - A Comparative Study

Abstract: Speech development in children with hearing impairment (CHI) is hampered by inadequate auditory input. Speech of CHI has reduced intelligibility compared to typically developing children (TDC), mainly because of articulatory errors. Speech language pathologists (SLPs) assess these errors through perceptual evaluation and accordingly device the protocol to correct them through several sessions of speech therapy. Automatic methods need to be developed to reduce the time and enhance the accuracy of assessment. Acoustic measures of plosives may be utilized as valuable cues for automatic assessment. The current study was aimed to investigate the burst duration and spectral moment (centroid, skewness and kurtosis) of plosives in CHI in comparison with TDC. 24 children in the age range of 5 to 8 years, divided into group I (13 TDC) and group II (11 CHI) participated. Six words in Hindi embedded with plosives (/p/, /b/, /ʈ/, /ɖ/, /k/, /ɡ/) in the initial position were used as speech material. Burst duration, spectral centroid and skewness were found to be significantly different across the groups for most of the plosives, whereas kurtosis was not. Results indicate that these measures except kurtosis are potential cues for automatic assessment of articulatory errors.