Development of Computer Software for Pathological Analyzing of Thai Language Speakers

Abstract

The main problems of Thai language learners are on reading and writing issues. Especially, Thai language is unique comparing with other languages due to the different part of consonant phonemes from the vowel. It plays key role in pronouncing Thai language especially in the specific tones, segmentation of each consonant phoneme from the vowel is required for analyzing Thai speech signal. The conventional assessment method was on Thai language clinic. This paper, therefore, proposes the development of computer software for pathological analyzing based on the speech processing techniques, which developed in Delphi language. Our software can be also to support not only Thai speakers, but also foreigners practice themselves pronunciation of specific Thai words. There are three main processes of the proposed method as follows: 1) preprocessing, 2) template enrollment and 3) assessment. To obtain the featured templates, we have selected two parameters that are zero-crossing rate (ZCR) and time duration (TD) of phonemes. The speech signal of correct pronouncing is recorded and then ZCR and TD of each word will be categorized as the template.Finally, the final grade of assessment is determined by comparing input parameters with stored templates in the databases. In the experiment, this paper used 12 words, subjects (30 male and 30 female 20-25 years old) participated to test the software. The results show that the method can archive average accuracy rates of 71.24% to 92.47%.

Keywords : Thai Speech Pronouncing / Speech Signal Analysis / Speech Processing / Phonemes