SpeechMark Acoustic Landmark Tool: Application to Voice Pathology

One area of voice research that has historically been understudied is the interaction between voice pathology and acoustic aspects of the speech signal that affect intelligibility. Landmark-based software tools are particularly suited to fast, automatic analysis of small, non-lexical differences in the acoustic signal reflecting the production of speech. We are building a tool set that provides fast, automatic summary statistics for measures of speech acoustics based on Stevens' paradigm of landmarks, points in an utterance around which information about articulatory events can be extracted. This paper explores the use of landmark analysis for evaluation of intelligibility-based measures of vocal pathology.