Development of a recording protocol for the assessment of speech disorders

Speech disorder refers to multiple reasons due to which a person will be unable to produce speech sounds fluently. Articulation and Phonological disorders are the most common disorders identified among the people. Analysis of speech disorders helps in providing necessary information for providing liable treatment by speech language pathologists. Extensive preparation and proper selection of target syllables is required for the treatment of subjects with speech disorders. The present work aims at establishing a minimum assessment protocol to estimate the prevalence of speech disorder. This paper presents a method to develop the recorded syllables with the use of PRAAT tool. The sample consisting of a 3–4 second recording of the six standard syllables. The samples was obtained using the PRAAT program and recorded in the .wav format in 20 different laptops. The samples was recorded inside a laboratory with minimal acoustic conditions. These .wav formats are now analyzed in the PRAAT tool which yields the formant frequency listing of all the 120 samples. The obtained frequencies of 120 samples are compared with the reference sample collected from the noise free acoustic testing laboratory with the use of sound level meter (type 2250) at gain of 120db. The ideal sample with the least difference is used for the further processing and analysis. Further, the hardware implementation is done by inserting the specifications of the best sample to an external sound card that is externally connected to a laptop which directly helps the speech samples to be saved in .wav format. This protocol helps speech language pathologists (SLP) in saving time for treatment planning and considerable effort involved in generating word containing target syllables.