Donald C. Wold

Tracheoesophageal speech : with and without tracheostoma valve

The tracheostoma valve, developed by Blom and Singer1 combines the advantages of pulmonary air for phonation with hands‐free speech. Patients have anecdotally reported “more normal speech” with the use of the valve. This study was designed to objectively determine if speech acoustic and temporal measures existed between tracheoesophageal puncture using the valve, and those without the valve prosthesis, during speech production among the same subjects.

A Pilot Study of SPINE Test Scores and Measures of Tongue Deviancy in Speakers with Severe-to-Profound Hearing Loss

Two developments show promise in the assessment and remediation of defective speech production in persons with hearing loss. A perceptual speech-intelligibility test, the SPINE (for Speech Intelligibility Evaluation), is a simple, clinician-administered instrument which is valid, reliable, and clinically efficient. In addition, the development of acoustic measures of tongue deviancy, computed from formant frequencies, makes possible a direct lateral visualization of tongue placement in relation to standard vowel placement. In this study, SPINE test scores of 28 persons with severe-to-profound hearing loss were correlated with two measures of tongue deviancy during production of the vowels \i\, \a\, and \u\. For both measures of tongue deviancy, correlations with the SPINE were significant for the three vowels combined and for the isolated vowel \i\. These findings suggest that clinicians may ultimately have two different but complementary means of assessing speech production in persons with hearing loss.

Articulatory parameters used to generate vocal tract shapes and bark‐difference dimensions

In this study, the correlation between two articulatory parameters used to generate vocal tract shapes from formant frequencies and three bark‐difference dimensions were examined. Ladefoged et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 64, 1027–1035 (1978)] identified the articulatory parameters w1 and w2 as the front‐raising and back‐raising proportions of tongue shape and showed how they may be calculated from formant frequencies. The ten American English vowels of Peterson and Barney were used for men and women. The three bark‐difference dimensions were described by Syrdal and Gopal [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 79, 1086–1100 (1986)]. The F1−F0 dimension represents vowel height and the F3−F2 dimension corresponds to vowel place of articulation. The linear correlation between F1−F0 and w2 was −0.86 (p < 0.001) and that between F3−F2 and w1 was −0.96 (p < 0.001).

Correlation of SPINE test scores with measures of tongue deviancy computed from formant frequencies in hearing‐impaired speakers

When the first three formant frequencies are given in vowel production, plausible midsagittal vocal tract shapes may be generated easily [D. C. Wold, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 78, S55 (1985)]. As a measure of tongue deviancy, this technique was used to compute the root‐mean‐square deviation with vocal‐tract widths computed from measured formant frequencies and the standard widths computed from average formant frequencies for adults. The vowels selected for analysis were /i/,/u/, and /a/. A perceptual speech intelligibility test for the hearing‐impaired, called SPINE for speech intelligibility evaluation, was administered to 28 hearing‐impaired speakers. The Pearson product‐moment correlation was computed between the SPINE test scores of the subjects and the inverse of the tongue deviancy. The preliminary results were positive with r equal to 0.53 (p<0.01), 0.02, 0.27, and 0.54 (p<0.01) for /i/,/u/,/a/, and the vowels combined, respectively. Thus verbal speech intelligibility scores for the hearing‐impa...