摘要：The use of forced alignment for automatic acoustic-phonetic segmentation of oral discourseproduced by Cantonese speakers with aphasia was first reported by Lee et al. (2012). Specifically,using the HTK (Hidden Markov Model Toolkit), alignment and segmentation of initial consonantsand rime of syllables in samples of read speech and spontaneous oral production was conductedautomatically. This method of acoustic sample processing allowed subsequent measurement ofvarious acoustic parameters of the speech samples.This study aims to investigate the statistical variation of speech duration in Cantonese oral discourseby speakers with aphasia. It is focused on the duration of continuous speech chunks and the durationratio of speech chunk and inter-chunk pauses. The observations on aphasic speech are comparedwith those of normal speech.
