“…In unvoiced speech, the excitation signal has a noisy nature and its kurtosis is relatively low (Drugman, 2014), while in voiced speech, it exhibits quasi-periodic discontinuities at the Glottal Closure Instants (GCIs, (Drugman et al, 2012b)) which is reflected by a greater sparsity and hence higher values of the kurtosis (Drugman, 2014). The kurtosis of the LP residual signal was used in (Falk et al, 2012) as an efficient way to characterize the vocal harshness in spastic dysarthric speech.…”