Auditory–Perceptual Assessment of Fluency in Typical and Neurologically Disordered Speech

Penttilä, Nelly; Korpijaakko‐Huuhka, Anna‐Maija; Kent, Raymond D.

doi:10.1044/2018_jslhr-s-17-0326

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 68 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Connected speech, nonetheless, represents the most ecologically valid sample type and affects how people with AOS are perceived by naïve listeners (Harmon, Jacks, Haley, & Faldowski, 2016) and judged by clinicians (Penttilä et al, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Based on the present findings, we suggest that measures of rate during connected speech can account for improvements in cognitive-linguistic processing in aphasia but might overlook changes in fluency related to motor control. Because speech fluency in aphasia is multifaceted (Feyereisen, Pillon, & de Partz, 1991;Penttilä et al, 2018), considering both the rate of speech and different behaviors that interrupt the flow of speech (e.g., pausing and repetitions) could better specify changes in speech and language production during connected speech.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Speech Fluency in Acquired Apraxia of Speech During Narrative Discourse: Group Comparisons and Dual-Task Effects

Harmon

Jacks

Haley

2019

Am J Speech Lang Pathol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose Slowed speech and interruptions to the flow of connected speech are common in aphasia. These features are also observed during dual-task performance for neurotypical adults. The purposes of this study were to determine (a) whether indices of fluency related to cognitive–linguistic versus motor processing would differ between speakers with aphasia plus apraxia of speech (AOS) and speakers with aphasia only and (b) whether cognitive load reduces fluency in speakers with aphasia with and without AOS. Method Fourteen speakers with aphasia (7 with AOS) and 7 neurotypical controls retold short stories alone (single task) and while simultaneously distinguishing between a high and a low tone (dual task). Their narrative samples were analyzed for speech fluency according to sample duration, speech rate, pause/fill time, and repetitions per syllable. Results As expected, both speaker groups with aphasia spoke slower and with more pauses than the neurotypical controls. The speakers with AOS produced more repetitions and longer samples than controls, but they did not differ on these measures from the speakers with aphasia without AOS. Relative to the single-task condition, the dual-task condition increased the duration of pauses and fillers for all groups but reduced speaking rate only for the control group. Sample duration and frequency of repetitions did not change in response to cognitive load. Conclusions Speech output in aphasia becomes less fluent when speakers have to engage in simultaneous tasks, as is typical in everyday conversation. Although AOS may lead to more sound and syllable repetitions than normal, speaking tasks other than narrative discourse might better capture this specific type of disfluency. Future research is needed to confirm and expand these preliminary findings. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.8847845

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech Fluency in Acquired Apraxia of Speech During Narrative Discourse: Group Comparisons and Dual-Task Effects

Harmon

Jacks

Haley

2019

Am J Speech Lang Pathol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Speech and language pathologists are trained to identify and differentiate communication disorders by using auditory perceptual judgement and acoustic analysis [11]. Similarly, speech intelligibility is commonly assessed perceptually, with the help of articulation tests and manual phonetic transcriptions [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language-Independent Approach for Automatic Computation of Vowel Articulation Features in Dysarthric Speech Assessment

Liu

Penttilä

Ihalainen

et al. 2021

IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Dysarthria is a common symptom for people with Parkinson's disease (PD), which affects respiration, phonation, articulation and prosody, and reduces the speech intelligibility as a result. Imprecise vowel articulation can be observed in people with PD. Acoustic features measuring vowel articulation have been demonstrated to be effective indicators of PD in its detection and assessment. Standard clinical vowel articulation features include the first two formants of the three corner vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/, from which clinically relevant parameters such as vowel working space area (VSA), vowel articulation index (VAI) and formants centralization ratio (FCR) are derived. Conventionally, manual annotation of the corner vowels from speech data is required before measuring vowel articulation. This process is time-consuming and requires specific expertise in speech signal analysis. The present work aims to reduce human effort in clinical analysis of PD speech by proposing an automatic pipeline for vowel articulation assessment. The method is based on automatic corner vowel detection using a language universal phoneme recognizer, followed by statistical analysis of the formant data. The approach removes the restrictions of prior knowledge of speaking content and the language in question. Experimental results on a Finnish PD speech corpus demonstrate the efficacy and reliability of the proposed method in deriving VAI, VSA, FCR and F2i/F2u (the second formant ratio for vowels /i/ and /u/) scores in a fully automated manner. The automatically computed parameters are shown to be highly correlated with features computed with manual annotations of corner vowels. In addition, automatically and manually computed vowel articulation features have comparable correlations with experts' ratings on speech intelligibility, voice impairment and overall severity of communication disorder. Language-independence of the proposed approach is further validated on a Spanish PD database, PC-GITA, as well as on TORGO corpus of English dysarthric speech. Results from these two corpora further demonstrate the efficacy of the automated features in separating PD/dysarthric speakers from controls, and that the features are correlated with Parkinson's disease severity ratings on PC-GITA and with level of dysarthria on TORGO.

show abstract

Acoustic features to characterize sentence accent production in dysarthric speech

Ramos

Hernandez-Diaz

Huici

et al. 2020

Biomedical Signal Processing and Control

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Auditory–Perceptual Assessment of Fluency in Typical and Neurologically Disordered Speech

Cited by 5 publications

References 68 publications

Speech Fluency in Acquired Apraxia of Speech During Narrative Discourse: Group Comparisons and Dual-Task Effects

Speech Fluency in Acquired Apraxia of Speech During Narrative Discourse: Group Comparisons and Dual-Task Effects

Language-Independent Approach for Automatic Computation of Vowel Articulation Features in Dysarthric Speech Assessment

Acoustic features to characterize sentence accent production in dysarthric speech

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About