Dysarthria

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

Response to subthalamic deep brain stimulation on speech intelligibility in Parkinson’s disease

Abstract: The study reports on intelligibility of reading and monologues produced by Parkinsonian patients who underwent unilateral subthalamic deep brain stimulation (STN DBS) Twenty right‐handed individuals with advanced Parkinson’s disease (PD) and dysarthria underwent unilateral STN DBS Ten were operated on the right hemisphere and ten on the left hemisphere The side receiving STN DBS had more affected motor function Speech was evaluated before surgery and three‐to‐six months after surgery with stimulator‐off and with stimulator‐on; all were off anti‐Parkinsonian medication for 12 h before evaluation Evaluators and subjects were blinded to the subjects stimulator status at the postsurgery evaluations Nonspeech motor performance was assessed with UPDRS‐III Each subject read a standard passage and produced a monologue on a preselected topic The readings and monologues were rated for intelligibility using UPDRS‐III item 18 Sixteen student clinicians in speech pathology served as judges Each speech sample was repeated three times The reading and monologue samples were presented in two blocks Within each block, the samples were randomly presented to each judge over headphones Presentation and response collection were completed using a computer procedure written in Praat The results are discussed with regard to speech and nonspeech motor response and to hemisphere‐specific response on speech intelligibility

Acoustic Effects of Speech Impairment

Abstract: Some of the most common forms of speech impairment are summarised here, in terms of their main distinctive acoustic and temporal characteristics (rhythm, intonation, etc.). Where they offer significant advantages, we also mention some non-acoustic methods for assessment and diagnosis. The speech disorders considered in this book are neurological in origin: primarily dysphonia, dysprosody, dysarthria and apraxia of speech, but we also mention some considerations relevant to the diagnosis of stuttering, Parkinson’s disease and even schizophrenia. It is suggested that the tasks of assessing severity of a condition, and of differential diagnosis, need not use the same acoustic features, and indeed there may be significant advantages in using complementary features and procedures for the two tasks.

Comparison of English and Chinese Speech Recognition Using High-Density Electromyography

Abstract: Speaking different languages requires different ways of pronunciation, and the muscular activities associated with phonation show different articulation styles. Therefore, clarifying the contributions of the articulatory muscles in different regions, such as the face and neck, is helpful for automatic speech recognition. However, it remains unclear how the articulatory muscles at different positions affect the classification accuracies of speech recognition across different languages. In this study, the technique of high-density surface electromyography (HD sEMG) was proposed to investigate the role of different articulatory muscles in classifying English and Chinese speaking tasks, respectively. The HD sEMG signals were recorded by 120 electrodes evenly placed on the facial and neck muscles across six subjects while they were speaking five English and Chinese daily words. Four time-domain features were extracted from sEMG recordings and used to construct a linear-discriminant-analysis classifier for speech recognition. The results showed that the classification accuracies of using neck sEMG were higher than that of using facial sEMG in both English and Chinese recognition tasks. The accuracies for Chinese speaking tasks were significantly higher than that for English when using facial sEMG only. Moreover, there was no significant difference in accuracies between the two types of languages when using neck sEMG. This study might provide useful information about the contributions of different articulatory muscles, and pave the way for automatic speech recognition across different languages for patients with dysarthria.