Intelligibility of Children with Cleft Lip and Palate: Evaluation by Speech Recognition Techniques

Cleft lip and palate (CLP) may cause functional limitations even after adequate surgical and non-surgical treatment, speech disorder being one of them. Until now, an objective means to determine and quantify the intelligibility does not exist. An automatic speech recognition system was applied to 31 recordings of CLP children who spoke a German standard test for articulation disorders. The speech recognition system was trained with normal adult speakers´ and children´s speech. A subjective evaluation of the intelligibility was performed by a panel of 3 experts and confronted to the automatic speech evaluation. The automatic speech recognition yielded word accuracies between 1.2% and 75.8% (48.0% plusmn 19.6%) with sufficient discrimination. It complied with experts´ rating of intelligibility. Thus we show that automatic speech recognition serves as a good means to objectify and quantify global speech outcome of children with CLP