Automatic speech processing software – New sensitive tool for the assessment of nasality: A preliminary study

Introduction: Automatic speech processing (ASP) software is a nasality assessment tool. ASP studies focusing on investigating sentences to find nasality and correlating ASP scores with other objective assessment scores measuring nasality are scarce. Hence, the present study aimed at comparing the nasalance values of the ASP software with the nasometer in typically developing children (TDC) and children with repaired cleft palate (RCP) across different stimuli. Methods: Participants included 30 Kannada speaking TDC and 10 children with RCP (9–12 years). Speech stimuli (oral, nasal, and oronasal sentences) were recorded and the values were obtained from the ASP software as well as the nasometer. The following statistical tests were applied: mixed ANOVA, repeated measures ANOVA, paired samples t-test, independent samples t-test and Pearson's correlation. Results: Like nasometer, the nasalance values of ASP software were high for the nasal sentences followed by the oronasal sentences and the oral sentences, for both the populations. Higher nasalance values were found for children with RCP than for TDC across all the stimuli. Significant differences were found in nasalance values between the instruments in oral and oronasal sentences in TDC and nasal sentences and oronasal sentences in RCP. The nasalance values across the stimuli between nasometer and ASP software in both the groups showed no significant correlations. Conclusions: ASP software was successful in identifying nasalance in TDC and children with RCP. However, a major issue needs to be addressed concerning the dynamic range of the software and it has to be validated on a large number of populations.