Amharic Speech Training for the Deaf
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Date
2006-08
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
It has been believed that all deaf persons can not make edible sound and can only
communicate through Sign Language. However, Deaf people can make voices and
communicate orally unless they are mute by nature. With speech training it is possible for
the Deaf to learn how to speak and “listen”. Speech training can be given manually with a
human trainer but it is a very tiresome task and its’ demands are more than the capability
of trainers. The solution proposed for this problem is an automated speech training
system which is already implemented for different languages. This thesis addresses a
similar solution but for Amharic language. Due to the limitations of special equipment
and software tools we can get we proposed modeling of a lip for the articulation of
Amharic characters which is part of an automated speech training system. We used an
Analysis-Synthesis approach to first analyze a real lip in speech making and applied the
output of the analysis on our lip model to articulate different Amharic characters. The
solution proposed is implemented in a prototype developed for selected Amharic
characters and its efficiency is tested with some students of Mekanissa Deaf School.
Keywords: Speech Training, Sign Language, Deaf Education, Lip modeling, Talking
Head
Description
Keywords
Speech Training; Sign Language; Deaf Education; Lip Modeling; Talking Head