Effect of speech tasks on cepstral measures of articulation

Hypokinesia in articulatory movements is one of the predominant characteristics in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Past research quantified such hypokinesias through measures of formant frequencies (F1 and F2) and/or derivative measures such as vowel space area. Extractions of these acoustic measures are labor intensive, time consuming and require phonetic segmentation. In this study, we characterize acoustic measures of articulatory range, rate and acceleration using human factor cepstral coefficients (HFCCs) across speech tasks (e.g. syllable repetition, sentence reading and monologues). Cepstral measures of articulation can be readily derived from entire sentences in an automated, time/computationally efficient method. We hypothesize that these cepstral measures will show a significant effect of group and speech task. Twelve individuals with clinical diagnosis of idiopathic PD and age/gender matched healthy controls repeated syllables at a fast rate, read some sentences, and provided monolog...