Automatically measuring speech fluency in people with aphasia: first achievements using read-speech data
Résumé
Background: Speech and language pathologists (SLPs) often rely
on judgements of speech fluency for diagnosing or monitoring
patients with aphasia. However, such subjective methods have
been criticised for their lack of reliability and their clinical cost in
terms of time.
Aims: This study aims at assessing the relevance of a signalprocessing
algorithm, initially developed in the field of language
acquisition, for the automatic measurement of speech fluency in
people with aphasia (PWA).
Methods & Procedures: Twenty-nine PWA and five control participants
were recruited via non-profit organizations and SLP networks.
All participants were recorded while reading out loud a set of
sentences taken from the French version of the Boston Diagnostic
Aphasia Examination. Three trained SLPs assessed the fluency of
each sentence on a five-point qualitative scale. A forward-backward
divergence segmentation and a clustering algorithm were used to
compute, for each sentence, four automatic predictors of speech
fluency: pseudo-syllable rate, speech ratio, rate of silent breaks, and
standard deviation of pseudo-syllable length. The four predictors
were finally combined into multivariate regression models (a multiple
linear regression — MLR, and two non-linear models) to predict
the average SLP ratings of speech fluency, using a leave-onespeaker-
out validation scheme.
Outcomes & Results: All models achieved accurate predictions of
speech fluency ratings, with average root-mean-square errors as
low as 0.5. The MLR yielded a correlation coefficient of 0.87 with
reference ratings at the sentence level, and of 0.93 when aggregating
the data for each participant. The inclusion of an additional
predictor sensitive to repetitions improved further the predictions
with a correlation coefficient of 0.91 at the sentence level, and of
0.96 at the participant level.
Conclusions: The algorithms used in this study can constitute
a cost-effective and reliable tool for the assessment of the
speech fluency of patients with aphasia in read-aloud tasks.
Perspectives for the assessment of spontaneous speech are
discussed.
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