Acoustic characteristics of dysarthria

Abstract

Acoustical characteristics of dysarthrias are evaluated based on both prosodic and segmental analysis. As a common result, reduced fundamental frequency (F0) range is observed for all kinds of dysarthrias examined, each of which is further characterized by its unique F0 distribution. It is also shown that the power of consonants/vowels and formant frequencies for the five vowels tend to be less contrastive for dysarthric speech. These results also suggest interaction between F0 range and vowel formant frequencies, which may be caused by efforts to emphasize prosody in speech therapy.