Characterizing dysarthric speech via spectral and articulatory modulation over long timescales

Jessica Campbell*¹, Dani Byrd², Louis Goldstein^1
1Linguistics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States

Abstract (200 words): Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder associated with temporal atypicalities and disruptions, not only locally but also over longer timescales. Campbell et al. (2025) demonstrated the utility of modulation functions in both the articulatory and spectral domains to index foundational temporal periodicities over stretches of speech. They suggest that such modulatory functions might be useful for quantifying breakdown in tempo and temporal regularity, such as in the rushed or slowed speech reported for dysarthria. While that study revealed comparable patterns of modulation frequency and variation across spectral and articulatory domains, this has not been demonstrated for dysarthric speech, especially given its disfluencies. The current study will report on the long timescale modulation of spectral flow and of articulatory kinematics in dysarthric speech. Articulatory point-tracking data (EMA & x-ray microbeam) with simultaneously collected acoustic recordings from patients with speech dysarthria (cerebral palsy & ALS) will be analyzed (drawn from the TORGO database [Rudzicz et al. 2011] and another public corpus [Weismer et al. 2003]). This study will serve to validate the use of acoustic modulatory metrics to assess temporal properties of articulation in dysarthric speech even in the absence of such articulation data, as is commonly the case in clinical settings.