LPC and Its Derivatives for Stuttered Speech Recognition

Abstract

Stuttering or stammering is disruptions in the normal flow of speech by dysfluencies, which can be repetitions or prolongations of phoneme or syllable. Stuttering cannot be permanently cured, though it may go into remission or stutterers can learn to shape their speech into fluent speech with an appropriate speech pathology treatment. Linear Prediction Coefficient (LPC), Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficient (LPCC) and Line Spectral Frequency (LSF) were used for the feature extraction, while Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) was used as the classifier. The samples used were obtained from UCLASS (University College London Archive of Stuttered Speech) release 1. The LPCC-MLP system had the highest overall sensitivity, precision and the lowest overall misclassification rate. LPCC-MLP system had challenges with F3, the sensitivity of the system to F3 was negligible, similarly, the precision was moderate and the misclassification rate was negligible, but above 10%.