• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.47-54
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• 2013

The aim of this study was to analyze consonant articulation errors produced by 90 speakers with cerebral palsy (CP). Phonetic transcriptions were made for 37 single-word utterances containing 70 phonemes: 48 initial consonants and 22 final consonants. Errors of substitution, omission, and distortion were analyzed using a confusion matrix paradigm showing the visualization of error patterns. Results showed that substitution errors in initial and final consonants were most frequent, followed by omission and distortion. Consonant omission occurred more frequently on final consonants. In both initial and final consonants, the within-place errors were more prominent than the within-manner errors. The current results suggest that consonant confusion matrices for dysarthric speech may provide useful information for evaluating speech intelligibility and developing automatic speech recognition system of adults with CP associated dysarthria.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.55-64
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• 2007

Laryngeal DDK involve with the rate, pattern, and regularity (periodicity) in opening and closing of vocal fold. This study was aimed at investigating the characteristics of laryngeal DDK between nonfluent and fluent speakers. One with an ataxic dysarthria (with cerebellar lesion) and the other with stuttering, and 13 normal speakers were evaluated. L-DDK were analyzed with MSP (motor speech profile, CSL 4400). Measures of DDK included: DDKavr, DDKcvp, DDKjit, DDKavp. An ataxic dysarthric speaker and a stutterer showed more reduced rate and aperiodic L-DDK (both adductory and abductory movement) than normal speakers. But the average L-DDK period (ms) in adductory movement in a speaker with stuttering showed more decreased than the other. Results from this study are preliminary. Nonetheless, results of L-DDK produced by nonfluent speakers suggested the possibility to have relation with slow rate of phonatory initiation and connected speech. In the future, perceptual studies are needed in conjuction with acoustic and speech production.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.643-652
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• 2018

Dysarthria is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that affects the control of articulation and pitch; therefore, it affects the uniqueness of sound produced by the speaker. Hence, dysarthric speaker recognition is a challenging task. In this paper, a feature-extraction method based on deep belief networks is presented for the task of identifying a speaker suffering from dysarthria. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated and compared with well-known Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient features. For classification purposes, the use of a multi-layer perceptron neural network is proposed with two structures. Our evaluations using the universal access speech database produced promising results and outperformed other baseline methods. In addition, speaker identification under both text-dependent and text-independent conditions are explored. The highest accuracy achieved using the proposed system is 97.3%.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.253-256
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• 2017

This paper deals with the implementation of speech disorder detection system based on machine learning classification. Problems with speech are a common early symptom of a stroke or other brain injuries. Therefore, detection of speech disorder may lead to correction and fast medical treatment of strokes or cerebrovascular accidents. The speech disorder system can be implemented by extracting features from the input speech and classifying the features using machine learning algorithms. Ten machine learning algorithms with various scaling methods were used to discriminate speech disorder from normal speech. The detection system was evaluated by the TORGO database which contains dysarthric speech collected from speakers with either cerebral palsy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.39-46
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• 2013

This study examined the effects of phonetic complexity and articulatory severity on Percentage of Correct Consonant (PCC) and speech intelligibility in adults with dysarthria. Speech samples of thirty-two words from APAC (Assessment of Phonology and Articulation of Children) were collected from 38 dysarthric speakers with one of two different levels of articulatory severities (mild or mild-moderate). A PCC and speech intelligibility score was calculated by the 4 levels of phonetic complexity. Two-way mixed ANOVA analysis revealed: (1) the group with mild severity showed significantly higher PCC and speech intelligibility scores than the mild-moderate articulatory severity group, (2) PCC at the phonetic complexity level 4 was significantly lower than those at the other levels and (3) an interaction effect of articulatory severity and phonetic complexity was observed only on the PCC. Pearson correlation analysis demonstrated the degree of correlation between PCC and speech intelligibility varied depending on the level of articulatory severity and phonetic complexity. The clinical implications of the findings were discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.51-59
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• 2016

The purpose of present study is to examine differences between habitual speech (HS) and clear speech (CS) in individuals with mild dysarthria. Twelve speakers with mild dysarthria and twelve healthy control speakers read sentences in two speaking styles. Formant and intensity related values, triangular area, and center of gravity of /a/, /i/, and /u/ were measured. In addition, formant-ratio variables such as vowel space area(VSA), vowel articulatory index (VAI), formant centralization ratio (FCR) and F2i/F1u ratio (F2 ratio) were calculated. The results of repeated-measures ANOVA showed a significant difference in F2 of vowel /i/ and F2 energy of vowel /a/ between groups. Regarding formant energy, F2 energy of vowel /a/ were observed as meaningful variables between speaking styles. There were significant speaking style-by-group interactions for F2 energy of vowel /a/. These findings indicated that current parameters could discriminate healthy group and mild dysarthria group meaningfully and that speaker with dysarthria had larger clear speech benefit than healthy talkers. We also claim that various acoustic changes of clear speech may contribute to improving vowel intelligibility.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.55-64
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• 2004

This study was to determine the effects of a massage and oro-facial exercise program on spastic dysarthric patients' lip muscle function using an electromyogram (EMG). Three subjects with Spastic Dysarthria participated in the study. The surface electrodes were positioned on the Levator Labii Superior Muscle (LLSM), Depressor Labii Inferior Muscle (DLIM), and Orbicularis Oris Muscle (OOM). To examine lip muscle function improvement, the EMG signals were analyzed in terms of RMS (Root Mean Square) values and Median Frequency. In addition, the diadochokinetic movements and the rate of sentence reading were measured. The results revealed that the RMS values were decreased and the Median Frequency moved to a high frequency area. Diadochokinesis and sentence reading rates were improved.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.185-195
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• 2004

Spastic dysarthria is a motor speech disorder produced by a damage to the direct (pyramidal) and indirect (extrapyramidal) pathways of the central nervous system. This study attempted to determine the influences of the severity of spastic dysarthria on the stability of voice. A sustained /a/, /a/ produced at the beginning of a sentence and at the end of the sentence were analyzed. The Praat 4.0.51 was used for analysis. The results showed a significant difference between the severe spastic dysarthric group and normal group matched by age and sex at the beginning and the end of the sentence. In addition, the severe group showed a significant difference between the first /a/ and the second /a/ at the end of sentence.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.173-177
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• 2018

Purpose: The primary goal of this study was to discover whether the articulatory diadochokinesis (sequential motionrate, SMR) collected using the Motor Speech Disorder Assessment (MSDA) software module can diagnose dysarthria and determine its severity. Methods: Two subject groups, one with spastic dysarthria (n=26) and a control group of speakers (n=30) without neurological disease, were set up. From both groups, the SMR was collected by MSDA at a time, and then analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: For the parameters of syllable rate, jitter, and the mean syllable length (MSL) at the front and back, the control group displayed better results than the dysarthria patients. Conclusions: At the level of articulatory diadochokinesis, the results showed that the use of MSDA software in clinical practice was generally suitable for quickly recording the parameters of syllable rate, jitter, and mean syllable length.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.2930-2936
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• 2014

The purposes of this study were to investigate the characteristics of speech rate and pause in patients with flaccid dysarthria. For this purpose, 15 patients with flaccid dysarthria and 15 normal speakers matched in gender and age participated as subjects. The overall speech rate, the articulation rate, the inter-sentence and the intra-sentence pause duration and pause frequency were measured during reading the standardized passage "Autumn"(Kim, 1996). As a result, the overall speech rate and articulation rate of patients with flaccid dysarthria were significantly slower than normal speakers and intra-sentence pause duration and frequency of patients with flaccid dysarthria were significantly higher than normal speakers, but those of inter-sentence weren't. The results from this study provides the speech rate index of flaccid dysarthria and indicates that to control the speech rate of flaccid dysarthria have regard to not only the overall speech rate and the articulation rate but also the intra-sentence pause duration and the frequency.