An Automatic Prolongation Detection Approach in Continuous Speech With Robustness Against Speaking Rate Variations

In recent years, many methods have been introduced for supporting the diagnosis of stuttering for automatic detection of prolongation in the speech of people who stutter. However, less attention has been paid to treatment processes in which clients learn to speak more slowly. The aim of this study was to develop a method to help speech-language pathologists (SLPs) during diagnosis and treatment sessions. To this end, speech signals were initially parameterized to perceptual linear predictive (PLP) features. To detect the prolonged segments, the similarities between successive frames of speech signals were calculated based on correlation similarity measures. The segments were labeled as prolongation when the duration of highly similar successive frames exceeded a threshold specified by the speaking rate. The proposed method was evaluated by UCLASS and self-recorded Persian speech databases. The results were also compared with three high-performance studies in automatic prolongation detection. The best accuracies of prolongation detection were 99 and 97.1% for UCLASS and Persian databases, respectively. The proposed method also indicated promising robustness against artificial variation of speaking rate from 70 to 130% of normal speaking rate.