Temporal characteristics of fundamental frequency control by auditory feedback and its application to stuttering evaluation

摘要

Functional abnormality in auditory feedback has been hypothesized as one of the causes of stuttering, a speech dysfluency. We investigated this possibility by Transformed Auditory Feedback(TAF; Kawahara,1993), which is a method for measureing the effect of auditory feedback onto voice pitch using parametric perturbations inserted into feedback loop. The results showed that stutterers' cross-correlation functions between the FO's of auditory feedback and uttered voice differed from those of non-stutterers. This indicates abnormal auditory feedback loop in stutterers, and suggests that the TAF method has a potential use as a diagnostic tool.