Multiband frame-based acoustic cues of vocal dysperiodicities in disordered connected speech

Two variants of multiband segmental signal-to-dysperiodicity ratio are used to summarize vocal dysperiodicities in connected disordered speech and their performance is compared to that of the conventional global signal-to-dysperiodicity ratio. Acoustic analysis is carried out by means of a generalized variogram to extract vocal dysperiodicities. The corpus comprises four French sentences as well as vowels [a] produced by 22 male and female normophonic and dysphonic speakers. It is shown that the multiband signal-to-dysperiodicity ratios correlate better with perceptual scores of hoarseness than the global signal-to-dysperiodicity ratio. The highest correlations are achieved by the acoustic marker based on linear regression analysis of the segmental signal-to-dysperiodiciy ratios in different non-overlapping frequency bands. The perceptual scores are based on comparative judgments by six listeners of pairs of speech tokens.