The purpose of this study was to develop a picture description task for eliciting connected speech from children with motor speech disorders. The Park Play scene is a child-friendly picture description task aimed at augmenting current assessment protocols for childhood motor speech disorders. The design process included a literature review to: (1) establish optimal design features for child ass...

This paper describes research on automatic assessment of the pronunciation quality of spontaneous non-native adult speech. Since the speaking content is not known prior to the assessment, a two-stage method is developed to first recognize the speaking content based on non-native speech acoustic properties and then forced-align the recognition results with a reference acoustic model reflecting n...

Bulbar motor deterioration due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) leads to the eventual impairment of speech and swallowing functions. Despite these devastating consequences, no standardized diagnostic procedure for assessing bulbar dysfunction in ALS exists and adequate objective markers of bulbar deterioration have not been identified. In this paper, we consider objective measures of spee...

Objectives: The present study aimed to determine the voice outcomes before and after the administration of voice therapy in patients who suffered an injury to the recurrent laryngeal nerve after undergoing thyroidectomy. Methods: The sample consisted of 26 patients (2 males and 24 females) aged between 18 and 80 years (m=55±12) who experienced injury to the recurrent laryngeal nerve fol...

Improved methods for assessing bulbar impairment are necessary for expediting diagnosis of bulbar dysfunction in ALS, for predicting disease progression across speech subsystems, and for addressing the critical need for sensitive outcome measures for ongoing experimental treatment trials. To address this need, we are obtaining longitudinal profiles of bulbar impairment in 100 individuals based ...

Recent advances in ASR and spoken language processing have led to improved systems for automated assessment for spoken language. However, it is still challenging for automated scoring systems to achieve high performance in terms of the agreement with human experts when applied to non-native children’s spontaneous speech. The subpar performance is mainly caused by the relatively low recognition ...

BACKGROUND relationship between speech, tonus and non-verbal praxis. AIM to verify the relationship between speech, tonus and non-verbal praxis of the stomatognathic system in preschoolers. METHOD 120 children, with ages between 4:0 and 5:11 years, were assessed. This assessment consisted of an anamnesis and a speech-language evaluation. The anamnesis was carried out with each child and was...

Objective assessment of synthetic speech intelligibility can be a useful tool for the development of text-to-speech (TTS) systems, as it provides a reproducible and inexpensive alternative to subjective listening tests. In a recent work, it was shown that the intelligibility of synthetic speech could be assessed objectively by comparing two sequences of phoneme class conditional probabilities, ...