Analysis of Articulation Errors in Dysarthric Speech

Abstract

Imprecise articulation is the major issue reported in various types of dysarthria. Detection of articulation errors can help in diagnosis. The cues derived from both the burst and the formant transitions contribute to the discrimination of place of articulation of stops. It is believed that any acoustic deviations in stops due to articulation error can be analyzed by deriving features around the burst and the voicing onsets. The derived features can be used to discriminate the normal and dysarthric speech. In this work, a method is proposed to differentiate the voiceless stops produced by the normal speakers from the dysarthric by deriving the spectral moments, two-dimensional discrete cosine transform of linear prediction spectrum and Mel frequency cepstral coefficients features. These features and cosine distance based classifier is used for the classification of normal and dysarthic speech.

Keywords: Articulation errors; Dysarthic speech; Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients; Spectral moments; Stops; Two-dimensional discrete cosine transform.