Sensitivity and specificity of an acoustic- and perceptual-based tool for assessing motor speech disorders in French: the MonPaGe-screening protocol

Abstract

To respond to the need of objective screening tools for motor speech disorders (MSD), we present the screening version of a speech assessment protocol (MonPaGe-2.0.s), which is based on semi-automated acoustic and perceptual measures on several speech dimensions in French. We validate the screening tool by testing its sensitivity and specificity and comparing its outcome with external standard assessment tools. The data from 80 patients diagnosed with different types of mild to moderate MSD and 62 healthy test controls were assessed against the normative data obtained on 404 neurotypical speakers, with Deviance Scores computed on seven speech dimensions (voice, speech rate, articulation, prosody, pneumophonatory control, diadochokinetic rate, intelligibility) based on acoustic and perceptual measures. A cut-off of the MonPaGe total deviance score (TotDevS) >2 allowed MSD to be diagnosed with specificity of 95% and an overall sensitivity of 83.8% on all patients pulled, reaching 91% when very mildly impaired patients were excluded. A strong correlation was found between the MonPaGe TotDevS and an external composite perceptual score of MSD provided by six experts. The MonPaGe screening protocol has proven its sensitivity and specificity for diagnosing presence and severity of MSD. Further implementations are needed to complement the characterization of impaired dimensions in order to distinguish subtypes of MSD.

Multi-Dimensional Variation in Adult Speech as a Function of Age

“…This study is based on acoustic recordings of 500 French-speaking neurotypical adults (235 female and 265 male speakers) aged 20 to 93, whose distribution is presented in Table 1 in terms of decade and sex. The recordings originate from several databases collected over recent years in the context of different projects related to the creation of the MonPaGe protocol, which has been developed to meet the need for a comprehensive speech screening tool for Motor Speech Disorders adapted to the French language (Laganaro et al 2021;Pernon et al 2020). The largest part of the data comes from the MonPaGe_HA (for Healthy Adults) database of spoken French (404 speakers; Fougeron et al 2018), which was collected in order to establish the reference values necessary for the standardization of MonPaGe (Laganaro et al 2021).…”

“…The recordings originate from several databases collected over recent years in the context of different projects related to the creation of the MonPaGe protocol, which has been developed to meet the need for a comprehensive speech screening tool for Motor Speech Disorders adapted to the French language (Laganaro et al 2021;Pernon et al 2020). The largest part of the data comes from the MonPaGe_HA (for Healthy Adults) database of spoken French (404 speakers; Fougeron et al 2018), which was collected in order to establish the reference values necessary for the standardization of MonPaGe (Laganaro et al 2021). In a second step, the database has been augmented by the recording of 96 speakers used as control speakers for the Mospeedi and SpeechNCo projets.…”

Changes in Anticipatory VtoV Coarticulation in French during Adulthood

“…Speech materials consisted of the reading of an isolated sentence and of a short (188 words), presented in Appendix A. These two tasks are part of the MonPaGe s screening protocol (Laganaro et al 2021;Pernon et al 2020) which was designed to Regional diversity was also meant to introduce diversity in the population, but the inclusion of the participants was not strictly focused on well-defined regional varieties in each location. For example, speakers recorded in Geneva originated mainly from the larger Lemanic area; speakers recorded in Paris originated mainly from diverse regions within the northern half of France.…”

“…Speech materials consisted of the reading of an isolated sentence and of a short story (188 words), presented in Appendix A. These two tasks are part of the MonPaGe speech screening protocol (Laganaro et al 2021;Pernon et al 2020) which was designed to assess the speech of patients with Motor Speech Disorders on several speech and voice dimensions.…”

Contribution of acoustic analysis to the detection of vocoid epenthesis in apraxia of speech and other motor speech disorders

“…The demographic and clinical characteristic of the patient groups are reported in Table 1 along with the severity of their MSD. Two measures of severity are provided in Table 1: 1. individual scores from the MonPaGe-2.0.s speech assessment protocol (Laganaro et al, 2020;Pernon et al, 2020), which evaluates different speech dimensions in various speech tasks and provides an overall severity score ranging from 0 to 32 and 2. The severity score from the BECD (Auzou et al, 2000) which is a perceptive judgment of severity ranging from 0 to 4 on 5 characteristics (voice quality, phonetic realization, prosody, intelligibility and naturalness) assessed by 6 independent raters.…”