Simulation of disordered speech using a frequency-domain vocal tract model

Addresses the issue of how the perception of disorder in selected types of speech disorders may be correlated with abnormal articulatory structure and with related acoustic properties. As a first step towards this end, we have developed an articulatory synthesiser based on a frequency-domain simulation of vocal-tract wave propagation. The synthesiser has been implemented by three numerical methods-Runge-Kutta, ABCD matrix and finite differences-which provide frequency-domain solutions to the transmission-line equation characterizing a lossy vocal tract. The synthesiser is applied in preliminary experiments where the its outputs are used to match samples from a corpus of steady-state speech sound, obtained from a dysarthric speaker, uttered in the /hV/ context