An assessment and intelligibility modification system for dysarthric speakers

Abstract

Dysarthria is a neuromotor speech disorder that occurs as a result of newlinemuscle weakness causing inability to control and coordinate one or more newlinearticulators thereby producing slow, slurred, mumbled, poorly articulated, and newlineunintelligible speech. Important cues, to assess and improve intelligibility of newlinedysarthric speech, can be found by analysing the acoustics of dysarthric speech newlineand the relevance of articulatory movements to these acoustic details. Majority newlineof the studies are based on developing automatic speech recognition (ASR) newlinesystems to improve intelligibility in dysarthric speech. Separate research works newlinehave been carried out on analyzing the kinematics in articulators such as the newlinetongue, lips and jaw movement for the dysarthric speakers. However, there is a newlinelack in imbibing this articulatory knowledge in acoustic details to perform a newlinecomplete analysis in determining the severity level of dysarthria and producing newlinean intelligible speech for the dysarthric speakers. newline