What Acoustic Studies Tell Us About Vowels in Developing and Disordered Speech

Kent, Ray D.; Rountrey, Carrie

doi:10.1044/2020_ajslp-19-00178

Cited by 32 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 226 publications

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“…Accuracy in vowel production is important for speech intelligibility and speech acceptability [30]. Reduced vowel space area (VSA) has been observed in children with speech disorders of different origin [31]. VSA is an acoustic measure method and a larger VSA is associated with clearer and more intelligible speech.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…VSA is an acoustic measure method and a larger VSA is associated with clearer and more intelligible speech. The reduced VSA in children with speech disorders can be explained by both auditory and motor limitations [31]. Vowel distortion is regarded as a common feature in children with CAS and could also be present in other motor speech disorders such as SMD and DD [2,32] and in phonological delay [33].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Range of motion (ROM) in the lips and jaw during vowels assessed with 3D motion analysis in Swedish children with typical speech development and children with speech sound disorders

Mogren

McAllister

Sjögreen

2021

Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Range of motion (ROM) in the lips and jaw during vowels assessed with 3D motion analysis in Swedish children with typical speech development and children with speech sound disorders

Mogren

McAllister

Sjögreen

2021

Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology

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“…To qualitatively evaluate the clarity (or, conversely, undershoot) of vowel articulation, formant related features are widely used, such as vowel articulation space (VSA), vowel articulation index (VAI), formant centralization ratio (FCR), the second formant ratio for vowels /i/ and /u/ (F2i/F2u) and so on [13,25]. These features are computed from formants of corner vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/, which are most commonly used in human languages and represent the extreme positions of the speaker's articulatory vowel working space [7,12]. These acoustic metrics have been used by speech and language pathologists (SLP) to study speech development, vowel identity and speaker characteristics in disordered speech [12], such as after stroke [26], in cerebral palsy [7] or in PD [27].…”

Section: A Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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]. As said before, vowel articulation is a reliable indicator of speech intelligibility, but it requires manual annotations.…”

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.

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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.

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“…The second formant has a direct relationship with the tongue: F2 is higher the further forward the tongue is in the oral tract and vice versa ( Kent et al, 1999 ). The examination of the first two formants involves knowing the activity of some essential organs in the articulation of speech, and it is important for measuring speech intelligibility ( Kent and Vorperian, 2018 ; Kent and Rountrey, 2020 ). Numerous acoustic measurements have been used in studies on the articulatory characterization of individuals with neuromotor speech problems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic Analysis of Phonation in Children With Smith–Magenis Syndrome

Guía

Heinze

Gómez-Vilda

et al. 2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Complex simultaneous neuropsychophysiological mechanisms are responsible for the processing of the information to be transmitted and for the neuromotor planning of the articulatory organs involved in speech. The nature of this set of mechanisms is closely linked to the clinical state of the subject. Thus, for example, in populations with neurodevelopmental deficits, these underlying neuropsychophysiological procedures are deficient and determine their phonation. Most of these cases with neurodevelopmental deficits are due to a genetic abnormality, as is the case in the population with Smith–Magenis syndrome (SMS). SMS is associated with neurodevelopmental deficits, intellectual disability, and a cohort of characteristic phenotypic features, including voice quality, which does not seem to be in line with the gender, age, and complexion of the diagnosed subject. The phonatory profile and speech features in this syndrome are dysphonia, high f0, excess vocal muscle stiffness, fluency alterations, numerous syllabic simplifications, phoneme omissions, and unintelligibility of speech. This exploratory study investigates whether the neuromotor deficits in children with SMS adversely affect phonation as compared to typically developing children without neuromotor deficits, which has not been previously determined. The authors compare the phonatory performance of a group of children with SMS (N = 12) with a healthy control group of children (N = 12) matched in age, gender, and grouped into two age ranges. The first group ranges from 5 to 7 years old, and the second group goes from 8 to 12 years old. Group differences were determined for two forms of acoustic analysis performed on repeated recordings of the sustained vowel /a/ F1 and F2 extraction and cepstral peak prominence (CPP). It is expected that the results will enlighten the question of the underlying neuromotor aspects of phonation in SMS population. These findings could provide evidence of the susceptibility of phonation of speech to neuromotor disturbances, regardless of their origin.

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What Acoustic Studies Tell Us About Vowels in Developing and Disordered Speech

Cited by 32 publications

References 226 publications

Range of motion (ROM) in the lips and jaw during vowels assessed with 3D motion analysis in Swedish children with typical speech development and children with speech sound disorders

Range of motion (ROM) in the lips and jaw during vowels assessed with 3D motion analysis in Swedish children with typical speech development and children with speech sound disorders

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

Acoustic Analysis of Phonation in Children With Smith–Magenis Syndrome

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