Vocal tract area functions to assist in determining voiced epochs in esophageal speech

Esophageal talkers may have reduced intelligibility due to both time domain and frequency domain variability. The unpredictable nature of esophageal speech can cause problems when automatic procedures are used in applications such as long-distance telephone messages. The current study compared a standard coding algorithm (LPC-10e) with a novel approach to determining voiced periods (vocal tract area functions) in the speech of esophageal talkers. The results of the study showed that the sentences synthesized with the vocal tract area function algorithm were more intelligible than those synthesized with the standard LPC-10e algorithm. Supplemental information, such as vocal tract area functions, may be useful in determining voiced epochs when variability in vocal parameters is high.