ISCA Archive Interspeech 2024
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2024

Exploring Syllable Discriminability during Diadochokinetic Task with Increasing Dysarthria Severity for Patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Neelesh Samptur, Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Anirudh Chakravarty K, Seena Vengalil, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh

We explore the discriminability among /pa/, /ta/, and /ka/ syllables, spoken during diadochokinetic (DDK) task, at varied severity levels of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) induced dysarthria. Though DDK rate is known to decline with increasing severity, the extent to which the discriminability among the syllables gets impacted at each severity level is not well understood. We perform manual and automatic classification of these three syllables on 100 ALS and 35 healthy subjects. Manual classification is done through listening tests. Spectral and self-supervised speech cues with deep neural classifiers are used for automatic classification. Manual classification accuracies decline from 84.07% on healthy utterances to 27.41% on utterances of the most severe patients. Automatic methods are found to outperform humans achieving 15.93% and 50.37% higher accuracies (absolute), respectively. Thus, discriminative acoustic cues seem to persist among the syllables, which automatic methods capture.