Assessment of laryngeal dysfunctions of dysarthric speakers.

Dysarthria is a neuromotor impairment of speech that affects one or more of the speech sub-systems. It is reflected in the acoustic characteristics of the phonemes as deviations from their healthy counterparts. In the current work, the deviations associated with laryngeal dysfunctions are analysed in order to assess and quantify parameters that will help evaluate dysarthria. Perturbation measures, pitch period statistics and Pitch Variation Index (PVI) are computed for the assessment of laryngeal dysfunctions of dysarthric speakers. The assessments were performed on the Nemours database of dysarthric speech and compared with normal speakers available in the TIMIT speech corpus. The results were correlated with Frenchay Dysarthria Assessment (FDA) scores. The analysis resulted in a technique to predict the degree of severity of dysarthria and illustrate the multi-causal nature of the disorder.