PURPOSE To investigate the effect of perceptual inter-judge agreement of hypernasality on velopharyngeal (VP) closure prediction. METHODS Two logistic regression models were developed aiming to verify the possibility of predicting the VP closure using the following characteristics: rating of VP closure (adequate, borderline, inadequate), determined by the pressure-flow technique, degree of hy...

Despite different theoretical perspectives and methodologies, nasal vowels in Brazilian Portuguese are characterized by their variability. Such variability can be understood in terms of vowel height related to velum movement (Clumeck, 1976; Cagliari, 1977) or in terms of segmental right context (Almeida, 1976; Cagliari, 1977; Shosted, 2006; Lovatto, 2008; Medeiros et al., 2008). Brazilian Portu...

Hypernasality is a commonly perceived characteristic of speech in deaf adults and children, but the mechanism of this abnormal nasal resonance is poorly understood. The impact of cochlear implantation on nasalance measures in children with severe auditory deprivation has not been previously reported. We conducted a study of nasality in 6 deaf children who had undergone cochlear implantation. Vo...

This study compares four nasalance measures computed as ratios between the amplitude of signals recorded with accelerometers and microphones. Two new measures based on RMS amplitude differences between the nasal signal and either the vocal folds vibration signal (LND) or the oral acoustic signal (OND) are introduced. Measures were compared on a total of 584 utterances produced by four native Fr...

A soft-decision Ephraim-Malah suppression rule based speech enhancement algorithm is proposed for intelligibility enhancement in parametric speech coders. A glottal sensor is used to improve the intelligibility of a baseline system that uses only the acoustic microphone. The objective measure test shows that the proposed system decreases the spectral distortion by 2-3 dB for most phonetic class...

In the first phase of this paper, we describe the construction of a Bangla speech synthesizer. In the second phase, we discuss our work on Bangla nasal vowel. Nasality is one of the distinctive characteristic of Bangla phonemes. We discuss methods employed for transforming Bangla oral vowel to the corresponding nasal vowel counterpart and its application to our speech synthesizer. The perceptua...

Forty-seven patients with advanced larynx/hypopharynx, nasopharynx or oropharynx/oral cavity cancer were recorded before, and 10 weeks after concomitant chemoradiotherapy (CCRT), to investigate the effect of the tumor versus the effects of treatment. To evaluate voice functioning before and after treatment, voice quality and glottal behavior of sustained /a/ vowels were analyzed acoustically an...