1.7HCJun 16
Towards Speech Impairment Prediction in German-Speaking Individuals with Amyotrophic Lateral SclerosisMonica Gonzalez-Machorro, Ricarda von Heynitz, Justine Hanslmeier et al.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease, often affecting speech due to bulbar dysfunction. In this study, we predict speech impairment in people with ALS (pwALS) using two clinical speech-related scores. We evaluate cross-sectional (across speakers) and personalised (within-speaker) modelling paradigms and analyse the utility of common speech tasks to contribute to the standardisation of speech data collection for pwALS. Experiments on a German-speaking cohort of 66 pwALS show that repetition tasks (/da/-/da/, /da/-/ba/) achieved the best cross-sectional performance (Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) = 0.62) for predicting the Quality of Life in the Dysarthric Speaker questionnaire, while the within-speaker setting reached a CCC of 0.86. This study represents an initial step towards speech impairment prediction in German-speaking pwALS and highlights the potential of automated speech analysis as a supportive tool for speech impairment assessment.
Articulatory Feature Prediction from Surface EMG during Speech ProductionJihwan Lee, Kevin Huang, Kleanthis Avramidis et al.
We present a model for predicting articulatory features from surface electromyography (EMG) signals during speech production. The proposed model integrates convolutional layers and a Transformer block, followed by separate predictors for articulatory features. Our approach achieves a high prediction correlation of approximately 0.9 for most articulatory features. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these predicted articulatory features can be decoded into intelligible speech waveforms. To our knowledge, this is the first method to decode speech waveforms from surface EMG via articulatory features, offering a novel approach to EMG-based speech synthesis. Additionally, we analyze the relationship between EMG electrode placement and articulatory feature predictability, providing knowledge-driven insights for optimizing EMG electrode configurations. The source code and decoded speech samples are publicly available.