Dysarthria

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

Cultural influences on attitudes toward speech disorders: aos, dysarthria, and stuttering

Abstract: In a multicultural country like Malaysia, culture is an important element that has great influences on the people's attitudes and behavior significantly. Therefore, a multicultural population in which the prevalence of speech disorders is on the rise may have various attitudes toward these disorders and the individuals with these disorders. Consequently, this study was conducted among UNIMAS students with Malaysian citizenship to see if there were any differences in attitudes toward three speech disorders, namely AOS, dysarthria, and stuttering, based on their various cultural groups. Data was collected via questionnaires that measured the attitudes of respondents based on a 5 point Likert scale. One-Way Analysis of . Variance (ANOVA) in SPSS was used to analyze the data in order to determine if differences did exist. Findings showed that attitudes toward speech disorders did not vary according to culture in this subpopulation. In addition, data analysis indicated that respondents generally have positive attitudes toward speech disorders. Improvements like expanding the population under study and using qualitative measures to measure attitudes should be employed in future research to obtain more accurate and representative findings. To conclude, different cultures do not affect Malaysian university students' attitudes toward speech disorders.

Case report: First case of neuromelioidosis in Europe: CNS infection caused by Burkholderia pseudomallei

Abstract: Neuromelioidosis is a rare CNS infection caused by Burkholderia pseudomallei and is characterized by high morbidity and mortality. Our report presents the diagnostic and therapeutic approach of the first case of neuromelioidosis confirmed in Europe. A 47-year-old man with a medical history of recurrent otitis with otorrhea and fever after tympanoplasty and radical cavity revision operation on the left ear was admitted with headache, decreased level of consciousness, dysarthria, left-sided hemiparesis, and urinary incontinence. After extensive investigations including MRI, microbiological, serological, and CSF analyses, and, ultimately, brain biopsy, a diagnosis of neuromelioidosis was established. Despite antibiotic treatment, the patient showed no clinical improvement and remained in a severely compromised neurological state under mandatory mechanical ventilation. Neuromelioidosis can pose a diagnostic challenge requiring an extensive diagnostic evaluation because of its uncommon clinical and radiological presentations.

Automatic Speaker Verification System for Dysarthria Patients

Abstract: Dysarthria is one of the most common speech communication disorder associate with a neurological damage that weakens the muscles necessary for speech. In this paper, we present our efforts towards developing an automatic speaker verification (ASV) system based on x -vectors for dysarthric speakers with varying speech intelligibility (low, medium and high). For that purpose, a baseline ASV system was trained on speech data from healthy speakers since there is severe scarcity of data from dysarthric speakers. To improve the performance with respect to dysarthric speakers, data augmentation based on duration modification is proposed in this study. Duration modification with several scaling factors was applied to healthy training speech. An ASV system was then trained on healthy speech augmented with its duration modified versions. It compen-sates for the substantial disparities in phone duration between normal and dysarthric speakers of varying speech intelligibilty. Experiment evaluations presented in this study show that proposed duration-modification-based data augmentation resulted in a relative improvement of 22% over the baseline. Further to that, a relative improvement of 26% was obtained in the case of speakers with high severity level of dysarthria.