Abnormal Articulation Detecting Model with Fluctuation Measurements Using Acoustic Analysis

Articulation disorder is a condition in which the mouth, tongue, vocal cords, and other parts of the body that play an important role in producing voice are damaged, resulting in the inability to produce sound. To diagnose articulation disorders, the movement and shape of each organ concerned with pronunciation are examined. If necessary, the underlying disease or disorder should be managed properly. In it, a speech therapist tests your pronunciation. The observation of conversation and the examination of the pronunciation of each syllable are used to distinguish between mistakes and the degree of articulation disorder. However, these processes are time consuming and labor intensive and are subjective judgments by experts. Therefore, it is important to investigate the characteristics of vocal signals by acoustic analysis of speech objectively. In this study, we focused on fluctuations in the period and amplitude of speech signals and predicted a model for detecting abnormal articulations using fluctuation measurement of the voice data in six healthy subjects and nine patients with an articulation disorder. We used inverse probability of treatment weighting to match the variability for the two groups using the inverse of propensity scores. As the results, the classification performance area under the curve was 0.781 (sensitivity: 0.781, specificity: 0.680) for healthy subjects and patients. We conclude that acoustic analyzing techniques are useful for diagnosing and treating articulation disorders.