Recognition of Vowels and Plosives for Development of Speech Training System.

In order to rehabilitate patients wearing maxillary prosthesis back to normal standards as soon as possible, a new speech training method was developed. This new system enables one to distinguish certain vowels and plosives using the partial auto-correlation (PARCOR) method, that is based on a linear prediction equation. Acoustic parameters indicated by the PARCOR coefficient can recognize the part where transition from the frontal consonant to the following vowel sound has taken place. This procedure involves the following steps;1. Each vowel sound is first discriminated by monosyllable pattern matching to reduce the count to 1/5 the size.2. The phoneme having maximum resemblance to the spoken monosyllable is selected and recorded. The analyzed data comprises 25 vowel sounds and 305 following vowel sounds for discrimination of vowels, and 130 plosive sounds for recognition of plosives from 5 different male speakers.Results showed the recognition rates of the vowels and plosives to be 95.3% and 78.5% respectively. Thus, this new system showed that it could be used as an important speech analyzer to aid in training and developing speech therapy.