Dysarthria

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

Parkinson-Speech Analysis: Methods and Aims.

Abstract: Parkinson's Disease (PD) is one of the most frequent neurodegenerative diseases worldwide Besides motor disorders, patients affected by this disease mostly suffer from a speech disorder named dysarthria It is treated by different speech therapies As a part of that, it is practice to observe the progress of the patients' dysarthria by classifying its severity by one of different possible scales like the National Technical Institute of the Deaf (NTID) scale These ratings are currently done by auditive assessments, which are very time consuming and expensive This work presents the conception of a tool for acoustical analysis of Parkinson speech and classification of the severity of the speech disorder, with the goal to improve the success of the speech therapies and simplify the classification

Dysarthria treatment for Parkinson’s disease: one-year follow-up of SPEAK OUT!® with the LOUD Crowd®

Abstract: Introduction SPEAK OUT! with The LOUD Crowd is a standardized speech therapy program typically consisting of 12 one-on-one treatments and ongoing weekly group maintenance sessions for patients with dysarthria due to Parkinson's disease (PD). It is based upon the hypothesis that increased attention to speech, which is a goal-directed motor activity, may compensate for the impairment in automatic sequential motor behaviors often demonstrated in patients with PD. We present results on the 1-year response to treatment. Methods Forty individuals with idiopathic PD received SPEAK OUT! delivered in 12 one-on-one 40-min treatment sessions 3 times per week for four consecutive weeks in addition to ongoing group maintenance sessions called The LOUD Crowd. Evaluations occurred 3 times at baseline, within one and six weeks after completion of the SPEAK OUT! sessions (N = 40) and 1-year later (N = 35). Assessments included mean speech intensity and intonation from reading and monolog, the voice quality acoustic measure called cepstral peak prominence (CPP), and scores on the voice-related quality of life questionnaire. Results The significant improvements achieved in all outcome measures from baseline to completion of SPEAK OUT! were maintained 1-year later. Participation throughout the year in regular group maintenance sessions (The LOUD Crowd) was positively correlated with level of improvement at 1 year for all measures except patient perception of voice. Conclusions These long-term data contribute evidence of the effectiveness of this speech therapy program for improving communication for individuals with PD and emphasize the importance of regular and ongoing group sessions to sustain therapeutic gains.

Distinctive acoustic changes in speech in Parkinson's disease

Abstract: Dysarthria occurs in the early stage of Parkinson's disease (PD), and the pronunciation of speech sounds is significantly different between PD patients and healthy subjects. However, the formant frequencies of different syllables as vocalized by Chinese PD patients remain unknown. In this study, we recruited 83 PD patients and 44 healthy controls to perform a syllable phonation test. The results revealed that all PD patients presented lower formant frequencies than the control group for various vocalized syllables, presenting a weak correlation with the severity of the disease.

Incorporated speech overlapped factor (Φ) into speech clarity index (Ψ): method to improve dysarthric speech severity evaluation

Abstract: Dysarthria is a name given to a group of speech disorders. Our research focuses on developing an automated system for dysarthric speech assessment. Being different from traditional speech assessments which normally rely on human-perceptual analyses, this paper proposes an indicator called modified speech clarity index (ψ†). By incorporating a speech overlapped factor (φ) into the previous version of the speech clarity index (ψ), the ψ† achieves a better performance as a speech severity index and speech recognition rate predictor for people with dysarthria. A number of experiments are made to compare predicted recognition rates, generated by ψ†, with the recognition rates from HMM and ANN system. The effectiveness of the indicator is evaluated in terms of (i) root-mean-square distance, (ii) correlation coefficient, and (iii) rank-order inconsistency. The experiments on a control set and an unknown set of eight dysarthric speakers show that ψ† achieves the outstanding results when compared to the standard assessments.

A Tool for Training Speech Imitation Accuracy

Abstract: Dysarthria is a neurological motor speech disorder that commonly results in reduced intelligibility. Communication partners can learn to better understand the speech of someone with dysarthria through perceptual training. Vocal imitation of the degraded speech during perceptual training has been shown to elevate this learning. A tool that provides the learner with real-time feedback regarding the accuracy of their imitation attempts during training may further enhance this learning. We describe a training tool that compares dysarthric speech productions with the imitation attempts of healthy subjects, using a two-level dynamic warp that accounts for both spectral and temporal degradation. Feature vectors derived from both the spectrogram and LPC are examined.