Prolongation Recognition in Disordered Speech using CWT and Kohonen Network

Automatic disorder recognition in speech can be very helpful for the therapist while monitoring therapy progress of the patients with disordered speech. In this article we focus on prolongations. We analyze the signal using Continuous Wavelet Transform with 18 bark scales, we divide the result into vectors (using windowing) and then we pass such vectors into Kohonen network. Quite large search analysis was performed (5 variables were checked) during which, recognition above 90% was achieved. All the analysis was performed and the results were obtained using the authors’ program – “WaveBlaster”. It is very important that the recognition ratio above 90% was obtained by a fully automatic algorithm (without a teacher) from the continuous speech. The presented problem is part of our research aimed at creating an automatic prolongation recognition system.