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.