Dysarthria

About: Dysarthria is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2402 publications have been published within this topic receiving 56554 citations.

HMM-based speech recognition system for the dysarthric speech evaluation of articulatory subsystem

Abstract: Dysarthria is a neuromotor impairment of speech that affects one or more of the speech subsystems, but is often associated with irregular co-ordination of articulators and restricted movement of articulators among other problems. It is reflected in the acoustic characteristics of the phonemes as deviations from their healthy counterparts. To capture these deviations, in this work, isolated-style, phoneme recognition system is developed using monophone as the sub word unit. The performance of this phoneme recognition system for a dysarthric speaker can be directly related to the severity of the problem. To train the sub word unit models, speech data is collected from seven normal speakers. Time-aligned phonetic transcriptions are derived using forced Viterbi alignment procedure. Using this data, hidden Markov models for the required phonemes are trained. Nemours database contains time-aligned phonetic transcriptions for all the ten dysarthric speakers. Using these transcriptions, phonetic inventory is created for each of the dysarthric speakers separately. These phoneme segments are tested with the phoneme models trained using the normal speakers' data. The performance of this speech recognition system is analyzed after phoneme grouping, based on the place of articulation, for the assessment of the articulatory subsystem of the dysarthric speech. The analysis output correlates well with the Frenchey dysarthria assessment (FDA) scores provided with the database.

Predicting Intelligibility Gains in Dysarthria Through Automated Speech Feature Analysis

Abstract: Purpose Behavioral speech modifications have variable effects on the intelligibility of speakers with dysarthria. In the companion article, a significant relationship was found between measures of ...

Lognormal distribution of pause length in ataxic dysarthria.

Abstract: Previous investigations indicated that pauses in ataxic dysarthric speech are abnormal, but little is known about the nature of their variation or whether it can be characterized by a common distribution. The following types of pauses were measured in spontaneous monologues of 16 speakers with ataxic dysarthria: pauses that contained evidence of respiration, pauses that occurred between words, between phonemes, within phonemes, and those associated with stop consonants. Results showed that the duration of pauses not associated with stop consonants can be modeled with two distinct lognormal distributions. The lognormal distribution predicted duration across pause types within 1.67% standard error, with the exception of pauses that occurred within phonemes. Distributional parameters pointed to some fundamental similarities between pauses that occur within words. The robustness of the lognormal distribution across pause types strongly supports this distribution as a viable and useful method of analysis. We h...

Speech rehabilitation in dysarthria after stroke: a systematic review of the studies.

Abstract: Introduction Speech difficulties such as dysarthria or aphasia are frequently seen, in addition to motor impairments, in subjects after stroke. Evidence acquisition Literature searches with the keywords: "stroke" AND "dysarthria" AND "speech therapy" OR "language therapy" were conducted in PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library and Web of Science to perform the systematic review about the several strategies used to treat dysarthria in subjects after stroke. The search was performed independently by two authors (CR and VM) from December 15th 2019 to January 15th 2020, using the PICOS criteria: participants were aging adults (>18 years old) affected by stroke; intervention was based on rehabilitation speech therapy; comparator was any comparator (all logopedic and speech rehabilitation tools); outcomes included clinical assessments, diagnostic scales and acoustic analysis of voice; and study design was RCTs, case series and case report, observational studies. The research identified a total of 94 articles for the first search and 56 for the second search. Sixty selected articles were analyzed by the reviewers. Twenty-five publications met the inclusion criteria and were included in the systematic review. Thirty-three articles were excluded for the following reasons: 12 involved individuals with aphasia or other speech problems different from dysarthria, 10 examined the clinical features of dysarthria, 3 treated on the impact of dysarthria on social participation following stroke, 8 did not include cases after stroke. Evidence synthesis A systematic review was performed to identify the main used speech rehabilitation treatments for dysarthria after stroke. We defined the several techniques to better guide the physician to delineate a speech rehabilitation protocol adopting the better strategies described in the current literature. Conclusions This systematic review tried to provide to the reader a complete overview of the literature of all possible different speech treatments for dysarthria after stroke. A correct protocol could permit to improve the communication and the quality of life of these subjects.