Naso-Articulometry Speech Database For Cleft-Palate Speech Assessment

Cleft palate has impact to speech, language and hearing problems. Speech therapy is a common treatment process required after surgery. To improve the assessment efficiency in patient with nasalance and articulation disorders, a novel equipment called Naso-articulometer (NASAM) has been introduced to speech and language pathologists (SLP). NASAM has been incrementally developed and used to collect speech data from cleft-palate and normal speakers in word and sentence levels as well as specifically to design for medical assessment. With the proposed new equipment, several issues regarding the assessment process and signal processing are raised to research. This paper was documented the detail of NASAM and speech collection, and addressed important speech processing issues with some preliminary experimental results.