Publication

Abstract : Dysarthria is a motor-neuro disorder that affects the quality of articulation required to produce speech. Also, there are temporal inconsistencies in the speech produced by people with dysarthria, leading to inconsistent formant trajectories. The trajectories change slowly in dysarthric speech, when compared to normal speech. In this work, we refine the formant trajectories of the dysarthric speech to improve its intelligibility. We use the P.563, P.862, standards along with composite measures to evaluate the quality of speech, before and after the refinement; we used NEMOURS database for the experiments involving mild dysarthria. For the proposed work, we attempt to emphasize the fast variations in the formant trajectories to enhance speech quality. It was observed that the quality of speech improved significantly. Our method will therefore encourage the dysarthric people to communicate more effectively and improve the pace of their rehabilitation. To the best of our knowledge, this type of work is not reported elsewhere.