Quantitative assessment of syllabic timing deficits in ataxic dysarthria

Parametric analysis of Cerebellar Dysarthria (CD)
may be valuable and more informative compared to its clinical
assessment. A quantifiable estimation of the timing deficits in
repeated syllabic utterance is described in the current study.
Thirty-five individuals were diagnosed with cerebellar ataxia to
varying degrees and twenty-six age-matched healthy controls
were recruited. To automatically detect the local maxima of each
syllable in the recorded speech files, a topographic prominence
incorporated concept is designed. Subsequently, four acoustic
features and eight corresponding parametric measurements are
extracted to identify articulatory deficits in ataxic dysarthria.
A comparative study on the behaviour of these measures for
dysarthric and non-dysarthric subjects is presented in this
paper. The results are further explored using a dimension-reduction
tool (Principal Component Analysis) to emphasize
variation and bring out the strongest discriminating patterns in
our feature dataset.