Purpose: Facial movement analysis during facial gestures and speech provides clinically useful information for assessing bulbar amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). However, current kinematic methods have limited clinical application due to the equipment costs. Recent advancements in consumer-grade hardware and machine/deep learning made it…

Purpose: There is increasing interest in using automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to evaluate impairment severity or speech intelligibility in speakers with dysarthria. We assessed the clinical validity of one currently available off-the-shelf (OTS) ASR system (i.e., a Google Cloud ASR API) for indexing sentence-level speech…

Purpose: Hypernasality and atypical voice characteristics are common features of dysarthric speech due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Existing acoustic measures have been developed to primarily target either hypernasality or voice impairment, and the effects of co-occurring hypernasality-voice problems on these measures are unknown. This…

Purpose: Oral diadochokinesis (DDK) is a standard dysarthria assessment task. To extract automatic and semi-automatic DDK measurements, numerous DDK analysis algorithms based on acoustic signal processing are available, including amplitude based, spectral based, and hybrid. However, these algorithms have been predominantly validated in individuals…

Purpose: The main purpose of this study was to create an empirical classification system for speech severity in patients with dysarthria secondary to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) by exploring the reliability and validity of speech-language pathologists' (SLPs') ratings of dysarthric speech. Method: Ten SLPs listened to speech samples from…

Purpose: To further understand the effect of Parkinson's disease (PD) on articulatory movements in speech and to expand our knowledge of therapeutic treatment strategies, this study examined movements of the jaw, tongue blade, and tongue dorsum during sentence production with respect to speech intelligibility and compared the effect of varying…

Purpose: This study evaluates the effects of a novel speech therapy program that uses a verbal cue and gamified augmented visual feedback regarding tongue movements to address articulatory hypokinesia during speech in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Five participants with PD participated in an ABA single-subject design study.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the minimally detectable change (MDC) and minimal clinically important difference (MCID) of a decline in speech sentence intelligibility and speaking rate for individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We also examined how the MDC and MCID vary across severities of dysarthria. Method:…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to identify the effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) on tongue and jaw control, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. The data were examined in the context of their utility as a diagnostic marker of bulbar disease. Method: Tongue and jaw movements were recorded cross-sectionally (n = 33…

Purpose: The primary aim of the investigation was to identify deficits in spatiotemporal coupling between tongue regions in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The relations between disease-related changes in tongue movement patterns and speech intelligibility were also determined. Methods: The authors recorded word productions from 11…

Purpose: In this study, the authors classified vocalic segments produced by control speakers (C) and speakers with dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Parkinson's disease (PD); classification was based on movement measures. The researchers asked the following questions: (a) Can vowels be classified on the basis of selected…

Purpose: This study compared movement characteristics of markers attached to the jaw, lower lip, tongue blade, and dorsum during production of selected English vowels by normal speakers and speakers with dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Parkinson disease (PD). The study asked the following questions: (a) Are movement…

Articulatory discoordination is often said to be an important feature of the speech production disorder in dysarthria, but little experimental work has been done to identify and specify the coordination difficulties. The present study evaluated the coordination of labial and lingual gestures for /u/ production in persons with Parkinson's disease…

Purpose: This study was designed to determine whether within-speaker fluctuations in speech intelligibility occurred among speakers with dysarthria who produced a reading passage, and, if they did, whether selected linguistic and acoustic variables predicted the variations in speech intelligibility. Method: Participants with dysarthria included a…