title: Cul-de-sac hypernasality test with pattern recognition of LPC indices.
abstract: Acoustic differences between samples of [i], [u], and [a] uttered in nose-open and nose-obstructed condition were studied in 6 women with isolated cleft palate and pathological nasalance scores and 9 healthy women with normal nasalance scores. The speech samples were depicted by 14-component vocal tract area feature vectors obtained by linear prediction and the differences between the samples were studied with a self-organized feature map. Each location on the map corresponds to a certain signal pattern, neighboring locations to similar patterns. The group of healthy subjects differed from the patients for vowels [i] and [u] but not for [a]. In the patients the nose obstruction induced a significant change in the location of these vowel samples on the map. In healthy subjects no such changes were detected. The results agreed with perceived differences between the subjects.
authors.affiliation: Department of Plastic Surgery, Töölö Hospital, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: M L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Haapanen
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hiltunen
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Leinonen
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Karhunen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002972:Cleft Palate / Q000150:complications; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013064:Speech Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement