Acoustic Features Associated with Sustained Vowel and Continuous Speech Productions by Chinese Children with Functional Articulation Disorders

Abstract

Functional articulation disorder (FAD) is a speech disorder commonly found in preschoolers, negatively affecting their day-to-day communication and in the long run their psychological development. Current FAD research mainly focused on the perceptual aspects, but not other means such as acoustic and physiological analyses. The present study aimed to evaluate the different acoustic features associated with sustained vowels and continuous speech produced by children with FAD and their age-matched controls. Speech samples produced by 67 children with FAD and 30 typically developing children were obtained from children's hospital and kindergartens, respectively. Articulatory-acoustic vowel space features, including formant centralization ratio (FCR3), F1 range ratio (F1RR), F2 range ratio (F2RR), and triangular vowel space area (TVSA), were calculated using the first two formant frequencies (F1 & F2) from vowels /a/, /i/, /u/. Voice onset time (VOT) values associated with the stop consonants /b/, /p/, /d/, /t/, /g/ and /k/ were also obtained. Results indicated that children with FAD exhibited articulatory undershooting with reduced range of articulatory movements, as well as poorer control over the release of oral occlusion when producing aspirated or unaspirated stops, when compared with normal counterparts. The findings support the notion that these acoustic features can be used to differentiate misarticulated speech from healthy speech, and could be used to objectively classify and evaluate FAD speech. Index Terms: functional articulation disorder, acoustic feature, formant centralization ratio, formant range ratio, triangular vowel space area, voice onset time * * *

Data mining of an acoustic biomarker in tongue cancers and its clinical validation

“…Since its discovery, FCR has demonstrated strong discriminative properties for speech disorders, not limited to dysarthria. Functional articulation disorder 39 and speech disorder related to hearing impairments 40 could also be detected and quantified by FCR. To the best of our knowledge, our study was the first to extend the application of FCR to the structurally based articulation disorder resulting from tongue cancer.…”