Cued Speech Recognition for Augmentative Communication in Normal-hearing and Hearing-impaired Subjects

Speech is the most natural communication mean for humans. However, in situations where audio speech is not available or cannot be perceived because of disabilities or adverse environmental conditions, people may resort to alternative methods such as augmented speech. Augmented speech is audio speech supplemented or replaced by other modalities, such as audiovisual speech, or Cued Speech. Cued Speech is a visual communication mode, which uses lipreading and handshapes placed in different position to make spoken language wholly understandable to deaf individuals. The current study reports the authors' activities and progress in Cued Speech recognition for French. Previously, the authors have reported experimental results for vowel- and consonant recognition in Cued Speech for French in the case of a normal-hearing subject. The study has been extended by also employing a deaf cuer, and both cuer-dependent and multi-cuer experiments based on hidden Markov models (HMM) have been conducted.