EXPLORING ARTICULATORY CHARACTERISTICS OF CANTONESE DYSARTHRIC SPEECH USING DISTINCTIVE FEATURES

Dysarthria is a kind of motor speech disorder due to neurological deficits. Understanding the articulatory problems of dysarthric speakers may help to design suitable intervention strategies to improve their speech intelligibility. We have developed an automatic articulatory characteristics analysis framework based on a distinctive feature (DF) recognition. We recruited 16 Cantonese dysarthric subjects with spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA) or cerebral palsy (CP) to support our research. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first efforts in collecting and automatically analyzing Cantonese dysarthric speech. The framework shows a close Pearson correlation to manual annotation of the subjects in most DFs and also in the average DF error rates. It indicates a potential way to describe articulatory characteristics of dysarthric speech and automatically assess it.