Dysarthric Speech

Dysarthric speech is speech that is affected by dysarthria, a motor speech disorder resulting from neurological injury or conditions that affect the muscles used for speech production. Characteristics include imprecise articulation, irregular speech rate, abnormal pitch and loudness, and breathiness or harshness. Dysarthric speech poses significant challenges for automatic speech recognition systems, which are typically trained on neurotypical speech patterns. In accessibility contexts, the poor performance of ASR on dysarthric speech creates barriers for people with cerebral palsy, stroke, traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's disease, and other conditions that affect speech production, as well as for some deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals whose speech characteristics differ from hearing norms.