This article presents a preliminary study of dysarthric speech by means of formant-to-area mapping. Dysarthria is a speech impairment which is the result of paralysis or ataxia of the speech muscles. Formant-to-area mapping is the inference of the shape of a tract model via observed formant frequencies. The corpus is composed of vowel-vowel sequences [iaia] produced by speakers suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and normal speakers. The results show that the shapes and movements of the acoustically mapped area function models are typical of the motions and postures of the vocal tracts of ALS speakers.