A Phonetic Level Analysis of Dysarthria in Kannada Language

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder and the most common neurodegenerative disease characterized by low volume in precise articulation, poor coordination of respiratory and phonatory subsystems, irregular pauses and so on. The challenging factor in improving the communication with dysarthria is speech intelligibility. The intelligilibility of speech can be determined by measuring the acoustic characteristics and phonetic structures of speech. In our analysis, we have concentrated on bisyllabic words in the Kannada language. The analysis is carried out with respect to basic acoustic parameters and spectrogram to extract fundamental frequency, formant frequency, jitter, shimmer, HNR and Standard Deviation using PRAAT tool. These results are helpful to identify and differentiate the complex natural frequency of the vocal tract functions with respect to normal subjects and dysarthria subjects. This study provides inputs to increase efficacy in the clinical assessments for monitoring and diagnosing the speech disorders for improving communication among human beings.