Application of laryngeal landmarks for characterization of dysphonic speech

Abstract

Dysphonia is often a result of laryngeal pathology, which elicits greater aperiodicity and instability in a speech signal. These acoustic abnormalities likely contribute to the intelligibility deficit reported by speakers with dysphonia. Acoustic analysis is commonly used in dysphonia evaluation; however, currently available algorithms focus on describing aspects of the signal that are relevant to perception of voice quality. Signal abnormalities contributing to the intelligibility deficit may be better described by a linguistically-motivated approach. One such approach, landmark-based analysis describes a speech signal with acoustic markers that are relevant to speech production and perception. The analysis further denotes onset and offset of speech events. This study examined the utility of acoustic markers specifically designed to detect laryngeal events for differentiating normal and dysphonic speech signals. In particular, we examined three markers: two markers that detect periodic moments with different acoustic rules, [g] (glottal) and [p] (periodicity); and one marker that detects moments of abrupt F0 change, [j] (jump). The analysis was performed on recordings of the first sentence of the Rainbow Passage from 33 normal and 36 dysphonic speakers. Results suggest that, for the same speech materials, counts of these markers differentiate dysphonic from normal speech.