Phonetic Complexity, Speech Accuracy and Intelligibility Assessment of Italian Dysarthric Speech

Fivela, Bárbara Gili; Sallustio, Vincenzo; Pede, Silvia; Patrocinio, Danilo

doi:10.21437/interspeech.2021-1862

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Speech is featured by redundancy in many ways: acoustic, phonetic, and lexical. However, noise, distortions, interfering sounds, or reverberation negatively affects speech intelligibility or acoustic measures related to linguistically contrasting units [9]. As a result, speech may be audible but not intelligible.…”

Section: State-of-the-art Of the Speech Intelligibility Assessment Me...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, it should be remembered that the best judge of speech intelligibility is the human ear. Therefore, there are many attempts to find a correlation between objective measurement results and subjective evaluation [5][6][7][8][9]. In general, the STI value can be determined using two ways, i.e., the direct method based on modulated signals or the indirect method based on the impulse response, according to IEC 60268-16 standard [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Novel Method for Intelligibility Assessment of Nonlinearly Processed Speech in Spaces Characterized by Long Reverberation Times

Kurowski

Kotus

Odya

et al. 2022

Sensors

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Objective assessment of speech intelligibility is a complex task that requires taking into account a number of factors such as different perception of each speech sub-bands by the human hearing sense or different physical properties of each frequency band of a speech signal. Currently, the state-of-the-art method used for assessing the quality of speech transmission is the speech transmission index (STI). It is a standardized way of objectively measuring the quality of, e.g., an acoustical adaptation of conference rooms or public address systems. The wide use of this measure and implementation of this method on numerous measurement devices make STI a popular choice when the speech-related quality of rooms has to be estimated. However, the STI measure has a significant drawback which excludes it from some particular use cases. For instance, if one would like to enhance speech intelligibility by employing a nonlinear digital processing algorithm, the STI method is not suitable to measure the impact of such an algorithm, as it requires that the measurement signal should not be altered in a nonlinear way. Consequently, if a nonlinear speech enhancing algorithm has to be tested, the STI—a standard way of estimating speech transmission cannot be used. In this work, we would like to propose a method based on the STI method but modified in such a way that it makes it possible to employ it for the estimation of the performance of the nonlinear speech intelligibility enhancement method. The proposed approach is based upon a broadband comparison of cumulated energy of the transmitted envelope modulation and the received modulation, so we called it broadband STI (bSTI). Its credibility with regard to signals altered by the environment or nonlinear speech changed by a DSP algorithm is checked by performing a comparative analysis of ten selected impulse responses for which a baseline value of STI was known.

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Section: State-of-the-art Of the Speech Intelligibility Assessment Me...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Novel Method for Intelligibility Assessment of Nonlinearly Processed Speech in Spaces Characterized by Long Reverberation Times

Kurowski

Kotus

Odya

et al. 2022

Sensors

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“…One of its early symptoms is hypokinetic dysarthria, caused by poor activation and coordination of the muscles involved in speech production. It includes a range of speech and voice impairments: reduced voice intensity, significantly narrower tonal range (monopitch), monoloudness, increased voice nasality, increased acoustic noise, imprecise consonantal articulation and reduced vowel space area, vocal tremor, harsh and breathy voice quality, impaired speech rate and rhythm, longer silent pauses (see, among others [2,3,4,5]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disfluency and speech management in Italian patients with early-stage Parkinson's Disease

Schettino,

Maffia,

De Micco

et al. 2023

Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) Workshop 2023

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Parkinsonian speech has often been described as "disfluent". However, the specific nature of disrupted speech in Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients has not been well observed. Considering that pauses, fillers, repetitions and self-repairs are commonly used in spontaneous speech for managing and monitoring the own speech production, this study aims at investigating the characteristics of disfluency phenomena patterns in early-stage PD subjects. To reach this goal, the monological speech of 18 PD patients and 18 age-and sex-matched healthy subjects, all Italian native speakers, was annotated distinguishing between Forward-Looking Disfluencies, such as silent pauses, lexical and non-verbal fillers and prolongations, through which message delivery is suspended for planning, and Backward-Looking Disfluencies, such as repetitions, insertions, deletions and substitutions, used by the speaker to edit something already uttered. Pathological and healthy speech samples were compared with reference to four parameters: the number and frequency of disfluencies; their specific functions; the syntactic positioning of the items; the duration of silent pauses, filled pauses and lengthening. Results highlight the relevance of investigating the specific uses, types and characteristics of disfluency phenomena rather than just considering their frequency of occurrence to gain insight into the features of Parkinsonian speech, even at a very early stage. 1

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Phonetic Complexity, Speech Accuracy and Intelligibility Assessment of Italian Dysarthric Speech

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

A Novel Method for Intelligibility Assessment of Nonlinearly Processed Speech in Spaces Characterized by Long Reverberation Times

A Novel Method for Intelligibility Assessment of Nonlinearly Processed Speech in Spaces Characterized by Long Reverberation Times

Disfluency and speech management in Italian patients with early-stage Parkinson's Disease

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