Children with prelingual profound hearing impairment lack auditory feedback and have great difficulty in acquiring speech. Most of them do not learn to speak properly despite a fully functional speech production system. Speech-training systems providing visual feedback of vocal-tract shape are found to be useful for improving vowel articulation. Vocal-tract shape estimation, based on LPC and other analysis techniques, generally fails during stop closures, and this restricts its effectiveness in speech training for production of consonants not having visible articulatory efforts.

A technique based on two-dimensional surface modeling of the area values, estimated by LPC analysis, during the vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel transitions preceding and following the stop closure, has been investigated for interpolating the area values during the stop closures. Surface modeling was based on least-squares bivariate polynomials and Delaunay triangulation methods. Using the technique, the place of closure could be estimated consistently for various stop consonants.

Based on this research and work by others, a visual speech-training system is being developed to facilitate various aspects of speech learning by the hearing impaired children.