Stuttering | EPFL Graph Search

Stuttering, also known as stammering, is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words, or phrases as well as involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the person who stutters is unable to produce sounds. The term stuttering is most commonly associated with involuntary sound repetition, but it also encompasses the abnormal hesitation or pausing before speech, referred to by people who stutter as blocks, and the prolongation of certain sounds, usually vowels or semivowels. According to Watkins et al., stuttering is a disorder of "selection, initiation, and execution of motor sequences necessary for fluent speech production". For many people who stutter, repetition is the main concern. The term "stuttering" covers a wide range of severity, from barely perceptible impediments that are largely cosmetic to severe symptoms that effectively prevent oral communication. Almost 70 million people worldwide stutter, about 1% of the world's population. The impact of stuttering on a person's functioning and emotional state can be severe. This may include fears of having to enunciate specific vowels or consonants, fears of being caught stuttering in social situations, self-imposed isolation, anxiety, stress, shame, low self-esteem, being a possible target of bullying (especially in children), having to use word substitution and rearrange words in a sentence to hide stuttering, or a feeling of "loss of control" during speech. Stuttering is sometimes popularly seen as a symptom of anxiety, but there is no direct correlation in that direction. Stuttering is generally not a problem with the physical production of speech sounds or putting thoughts into words. Acute nervousness and stress are not thought to cause stuttering, but they can trigger stuttering in people who have the speech disorder, and living with a stigmatized disability can result in anxiety and high allostatic stress load (chronic nervousness and stress) that increase the amount of acute stress necessary to trigger stuttering in any given person who stutters, worsening the situation in the manner of a positive feedback system; the name 'stuttered speech syndrome' has been proposed for this condition.

Novel Methods for Incorporating Prior Knowledge for Automatic Speech Assessment

Subrahmanya Pavankumar Dubagunta

Speech signal conveys several kinds of information such as a message, speaker identity, emotional state of the speaker and social state of the speaker. Automatic speech assessment is a broad area that refers to using automatic methods to predict human judg ...

EPFL2021

From Research to Reality: Evaluation of a Single-Computer Real-Time LVCSR System for Speech-Based Retrieval

Philip Neil Garner, Andrei Popescu-Belis, Nan Li, Maryam Habibi

This paper presents a series of tests that were performed on a state-of-the-art real-time automatic speech recognition system for English, in a single-computer implementation. As the intention is to use the system for speech-based query-free document retri ...

Idiap2017