Abstract
Alcohol intoxication is characterized by hypermetric movements (overshoot) in manual fine motor skills [Phillips et al., (2009). Hum. Movement Sci,. 28(5), 619–632]. It remains unknown whether hypermetric movements manifest in speech following alcohol intoxication. Recent work on a small population (n = 15) revealed vowel space area (VSA) expansion following intoxication [Chang et al., 2023. Proc. ICPhS ‘23 ]. To validate these findings, we made use of the publicly available Alcohol Language Corpus [Schiel et al., 2012. Lang. res. and eval. 46, 503–521]. VSAs were compared across 162 speakers (85 male, 77 female) while sober (n = 162) and intoxicated (blood alcohol level > 0.08%, n = 97) using an unsupervised method based on cluster center detection of normalized vowel formants [Sandoval et al. JASA. 134(5), EL477-EL483]. Substantial VSA expansion was observed for males (10.8%), while a smaller expansion was observed for females (3.6%). These results support recent observations of VSA expansion and suggest hypermetric tongue movement following alcohol intoxication. Further evaluations are ongoing and employ hierarchical linear modeling to compare the effects of specific blood-alcohol concentrations and speech tasks (free speech, tongue-twisters, repetition) on VSA expansion. [Research funded by Tenvos Incorporated for the development of commercial speaker state-detection algorithms.]
Published Version
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