Measuring Variability in Dysarthric Speech: Dynamic Time Warping of F2 Transitions

Abstract

This study investigated whether the quantification of variability of second formant (F2) frequency transitions metrics could be used to characterize dysarthria and capture deficits in motor speech productions. This study applied a dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm to quantify similarity of F2 transitions. Using DTW, F2 slope measures were compared to the utterance prior, yielding a distance measure between a pair of F2 slopes. These measures were averaged to examine the variability across multiple repetitions of the same utterance produced by speakers with dysarthria and healthy controls. The potential effects of varying articulation rates were also explored. Overall, findings suggest F2 slope variability quantified by DTW holds promise as a sensitive measure of dysarthria severity across a variety of rates.

Frits van Brenk

External consultant in the Motor Speech Disorders Laboratory

My research and teaching interests include motor speech disorders, clinical linguistics, experimental psycholinguistics, speech science, and research methods.