Comparison in Suprasegmental Characteristics between Typical and Dysarthric Talkers at Varying Severity Levels

Dysarthria is a speech disorder often characterized by slow speech with reduced intelligibility. This preliminary study investigates suprasegmental characteristics between typical and dysarthric speakers at varying severity levels, with the long-term goal of improving methods for dysarthric speech synthesis/augmentation and enhancement. First, we aim to analyze phonemes, speaking rate and pause characteristics of typical and dysarthric speech using the phoneme- and word-level alignment information extracted by Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA). Then, pitch and intensity declination trends and range analysis are conducted. The pitch and intensity declination are measured by fitting a regression line. These analyses are conducted on dysarthric speech in TORGO, containing 8 dysarthric speakers involved with cerebral palsy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and 7 age- and gender-matched typical speakers. These results are important for the development of dysarthric speech synthesis, augmentation to statistically model and evaluate characteristics such as pause, speaking rate, pitch, and intensity.