Intelligent Processing of Stuttered Speech

The process of counting stuttering events could be carried out more objectively through the automatic detection of stop-gaps, syllable repetitions and vowel prolongations. The alternative would be based on the subjective evaluations of speech fluency and may be dependent on a subjective evaluation method. Meanwhile, the automatic detection of intervocalic intervals, stop-gaps, voice onset time and vowel durations may depend on the speaker and the rules derived for a single speaker might be unreliable when trying to consider them as universal ones. This implies that learning algorithms having strong generalization capabilities could be applied to solve the problem. Nevertheless, such a system requires vectors of parameters, which characterize the distinctive features in a subject's speech patterns. In addition, an appropriate selection of the parameters and feature vectors while learning may augment the performance of an automatic detection system.