This paper presents a novel framework for automatic pronunciation assessment based on distinctive feature analysis. The major idea is to analyze learner’s speech segment to verify whether it conforms to the correct combination of distinctive features. A Distinctive Feature (DF) is a primitive phonetic feature that distinguishes minimal difference of two phones [1]. The overall framework is orga...

Objectives: In the early stages, most Parkinson’s patients display some degrees of voice and speech disorders. Speech disorders can negatively affect social interactions and human life, thus treatment plans for the disorders in the early stages might be further beneficial than the late stages. Therefore, we aimed to investigate on the effect of an intervention on Persian patients with early mil...

This paper highlights the appeal of dynamic assessment (DA) for speech and language therapists (SLTs), and describes the usefulness of various DA models and methods. It describes the background to DA, and the uses to which DA has been put, by educational psychologists in the UK, and by SLTs in the USA. The research and development of methods of DA are described, and the case for developing DA m...

Acoustical analysis of speech is considered a favorable and promising approach to objective assessment of voice disorders. Previous research emphasized on the extraction and classification of voice quality features from sustained vowel sounds. In this paper, an investigation on voice assessment using continuous speech utterances of Cantonese is presented. A DNN-HMM based speech recognition syst...