Interpretable phonological features for clinical applications

Abstract

Instrumental analysis of speech sometimes complements subjective evaluations in speech and language therapy; however, apart from elemental speech features such as pitch and formant statistics, higher dimensional spectral features are rarely used in practice because they are clinically uninterpretable. While these features are likely to somehow be related to clinical intervention, this relationship remains to be determined. This paper uses artificial recurrent neural networks to map high-dimensional spectral features into phonological features that are easily interpretable and provide fine-resolution information regarding articulation quality. The evaluation on a dysarthric speech data set shows strong correlation between the phonological feature measures and perceptual ratings. To increase clinical utility, we provide a new way to visualize phonological disturbances that provides clinicians with actionable information about intervention strategies.