Objective vs. Subjective Evaluation of Speakers with and without Complete Dentures

For dento-oral rehabilitation of edentulous (toothless) patients, speech intelligibility is an important criterion. 28 persons read a standardized text once with and once without wearing complete dentures. Six experienced raters evaluated the intelligibility subjectively on a 5-point scale and the voice on the 4-point Roughness-Breathiness-Hoarseness (RBH) scales. Objective evaluation was performed by Support Vector Regression (SVR) on the word accuracy (WA) and word recognition rate (WR) of a speech recognition system, and a set of 95 word-based prosodic features. The word accuracy combined with selected prosodic features showed a correlation of up to r=0.65 to the subjective ratings for patients with dentures and r=0.72 for patients without dentures. For the RBH scales, however, the average correlation of the feature subsets to the subjective ratings for both types of recordings was r < 0.4.