Defne Abur

Thomas B. Tienkamp, Teja Rebernik, Defne Abur et al.

This document outlines a PROSPERO pre-registered protocol for a systematic review regarding articulatory changes in speech following oral or orophayrngeal cancer treatment. Treatment of tumours in the oral cavity may result in physiological changes that could lead to articulatory difficulties. The tongue becomes less mobile due to scar tissue and/or potential (postoperative) radiation therapy. Moreover, tissue loss may create a bypass for airflow or limit constriction possibilities. In order to gain a better understanding of the nature of the speech problems, information regarding the movement of the articulators is needed since perceptual or acoustic information provide only indirect evidence of articulatory changes. Therefore, this systematic review will review studies that directly measured the articulatory movements of the tongue, jaw, and lips following treatment for oral or oropharyngeal cancer.

Bence Mark Halpern, Thomas Tienkamp, Defne Abur et al.

Automatic speech intelligibility assessment is crucial for monitoring speech disorders and therapy efficacy. However, existing methods are difficult to compare: research is fragmented across private datasets with inconsistent protocols. We introduce PathBench, a unified benchmark for pathological speech assessment using public datasets. We compare reference-free, reference-text, and reference-audio methods across three protocols (Matched Content, Extended, and Full) representing how a linguist (controlled stimuli) versus machine learning specialist (maximum data) would approach the same data. We establish benchmark baselines across six datasets, enabling systematic evaluation of future methodological advances, and introduce Dual-ASR Articulatory Precision (DArtP), achieving the highest average correlation among reference-free methods.

Thomas Tienkamp, Fleur van Ast, Roos van der Veen et al.

Surgical treatment for tongue cancer can negatively affect the mobility and musculature of the tongue, which can influence articulatory clarity and variability. In this study, we investigated articulatory clarity through the vowel articulation index (VAI) and variability through vowel formant dispersion (VFD). Using a sentence reading task, we assessed 11 individuals pre and six months post tongue cancer surgery, alongside 11 sex- and age matched typical speakers. Our results show that while the VAI was significantly smaller post-surgery compared to pre-surgery, there was no significant difference between patients and typical speakers at either time point. Post-surgery, speakers had higher VFD values for /i/ compared to pre-surgery and typical speakers, signalling higher variability. Taken together, our results suggest that while articulatory clarity remained within typical ranges following surgery for tongue cancer for the speakers in our study, articulatory variability increased.