Malay Alveolar Vocabulary Design for Malay Speech Therapy System

This paper presents a design of the Malay vocabulary for the Malay speech therapy system which emphasizes the articulation disorder case. The design of this database focuses on the Malay alveolar target words. It is one of the important target words for patients in therapy training exercises according to a speech-language pathologist (SLP) at the Hospital Sultanah Aminah (HSA) in Johor [8]. Presently, most hospitals and speech therapy centers in Malaysia use a myriad of words as training data during the therapy sessions and these words are diagnosed manually. The diagnosis process is very time consuming as there are too many words to cover and requires much involvement of the SLP. Through the design of a Malay vocabulary database (which focuses on Malay alveolar target words), both the number of words and training time can be reduced significantly. The system will also be used to replace the existing manual technique in diagnosis as it speeds up the analysis process for the SLP drastically. Based on past researches, a total of 108 target words were used where it was grouped into two categories; Malay alveolar target word and Malay plosives target word. The result of the experiment exhibits a recognition rate accuracy of approximately 97%.