Rupal Patel

Northeastern University | NEU · Communication Sciences and Disorders & Computer and Informaton Science

The current study explored the intelligibility and acceptability ratings of dysarthric speakers with African American English (AAE) and General American English (GAE) dialects by listeners who identify as GAE or AAE speakers, as well as listener ability to identify dialect in dysarthric speech. Eighty-six listeners rated the intelligibility and acc...

Purpose This study aimed to evaluate a novel communication system designed to translate surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals from articulatory muscles into speech using a personalized, digital voice. The system was evaluated for word recognition, prosodic classification, and listener perception of synthesized speech. Method sEMG signals were r...

Purpose: To explore the influence of listener profession on impressions of speakers with dysarthria with varying intelligibility using semantic differential scales. Method: Three listener groups (undergraduate students, emergency workers, speech–language pathologists (SLPs); n = 38) rated non-speech attributes of six adults with dysarthria that ran...

Speech technology applications have emerged as a promising method for assessing speech-language abilities and at-home therapy, including prosody. Many applications assume that observed prosody errors are due to an underlying disorder; however, they may be instead due to atypical representations of prosody such as immature and developing speech moto...

The ISAAC 2016 Research Symposium included a Design Stream that examined timely issues across augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), framed in terms of designing interaction, designing voice, and designing inclusion. Each is a complex term with multiple meanings; together they represent challenging yet important frontiers of AAC research...

Purpose: To compare vowel acoustics and intelligibility in words produced with and without contrastive stress by speakers with spastic (mixed-spastic) dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (DYSCP) and healthy controls (HCs). Method: Fifteen participants (9 men, 6 women; age M = 42 years) with DYSCP and 15 HCs (9 men, 6 women; age M = 36 years)...

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices have opened the gates to interaction for those with severe communication impairments. In the assessment and intervention, all components of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) should be addressed. However, an important Pers...

Although tongue twisters have been widely use to study speech production in healthy speakers, few studies have employed this methodology for individuals with speech impairment. The present study compared tongue twister errors produced by adults with dysarthria and age-matched healthy controls. Eight speakers (four female, four male; mean age = 54.5...

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices have opened the gates to interaction for those with severe communication impairments. In the assessment and intervention, all components of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) should be addressed. However, an important Pers...

Background/aims: This paper describes the design and collection of a comprehensive spoken language dataset from speakers with motor speech disorders in Atlanta, Ga., USA. This collaborative project aimed to gather a spoken database consisting of nonmainstream American English speakers residing in the Southeastern US in order to provide a more dive...

Purpose: Responses to intensity perturbation during running speech were measured to understand whether prosodic features are controlled in an independent or integrated manner. Method: Nineteen English speaking healthy adults (age range = 21-41 years) produced 480 sentences in which emphatic stress was placed on either the first or second word. O...

Reading fluency has traditionally focused on speed and accuracy yet recent reports suggest that expressive oral reading is an important component that has been largely overlooked. The current study assessed the impact of augmenting text with visual prosodic cues to improve expressive reading in beginning readers. Customized reading software was dev...

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems are used by many different types of people. While almost all AAC users have speech impairments that preclude the use of verbal communication, they may also have varying levels of vision or motor impairments, perhaps due to age or the particular nature of their disorder. Speed, expressiveness,...

Individuals with neuromotor speech disorders due to conditions such as Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson Disease and Cerebral Palsy have soft and slurred speech. These individuals receive speech training to increase vocal loudness and to speak slowly and clearly. Although successful in clinical settings, generalizability of these techniques to daily co...

One of the principal application areas for brain-computer interface (BCI) technology is augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), typically used by people with severe speech and physical disabilities (SSPI). Existing word- and phrase-based AAC solutions that employ BCIs that utilize electroencephalography (EEG) are sometimes supplemented by...

Text-to-speech options on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices are limited. Often, several individuals in a group setting use the same synthetic voice. This lack of customization may limit technology adoption and social integration. This paper describes our efforts to generate personalized synthesis for users with profoundly lim...

The goal of the VocaliD project (for vocal identity) is to develop personalized synthetic voices for children and adults who rely on speech generating devices (SGDs) for verbal communication. Our approach extracts acoustic properties related to source, vocal tract, or both from a target talker's disordered speech (whatever sounds they can still pro...

The purpose of this study was to develop a picture description task for eliciting connected speech from children with motor speech disorders. The Park Play scene is a child-friendly picture description task aimed at augmenting current assessment protocols for childhood motor speech disorders. The design process included a literature review to: (1)...

Background/aims: To understand how reducing speaking rate alters prosodic contrasts in speakers with dysarthria (DYS) and healthy controls (HC). Methods: Seven male speakers with DYS (mean age = 34.9) and 7 age- and sex-matched HC (mean age = 36.9) produced identical phrases with affirmative (A), contrastive stress (CS) or question (Q) intonatio...

Knowledge of vocal-tract (VT) length is a logical prerequisite for acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. Prior work has treated VT length estimation (VTLE) and inversion largely as separate problems. We describe a new algorithm for VTLE based on acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. Our inversion process uses the Maeda model (MM, [1,2]) and combines gl...

Exaggerated and redundant prosodic cue use has been noted among adults with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (CP) (Patel, 2004; van Doorn & Sheard, 2001). A possible explanation may be that speakers heighten prosodic contrasts to increase intelligibility. The current work examined whether children with dysarthria due to CP also produce exagge...

Vowel production contributes to the intelligibility of individuals with motor speech disorders. In adults with dysarthria, rate reduction and increased loudness have been shown to improve intelligibility partly because of changes in vowel production. The impact of prosodic modulation on vowel acoustics and intelligibility in children with motor spe...

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems are often used by individuals with severe speech impairments. Icon-based AAC systems typically present users with arrays of icons that are sequentially selected to construct utterances, which are then spoken aloud using text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. For touch-screen devices, users must lift...

Purpose: A review of the salient characteristics of motor speech disorders and common assessment protocols revealed the need for a novel reading passage tailored specifically to differentiate between and among the dysarthrias (DYSs) and apraxia of speech (AOS). Method: "The Caterpillar" passage was designed to provide a contemporary, easily read...

Most icon-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices require users to formulate messages in syntactic order in order to produce syntactic utterances. Reliance on syntactic ordering, however, may not be appropriate for individuals with limited or emerging literacy skills. Some of these users may benefit from unordered message for...

Individuals with severe speech and motor impairments rely on assistive communication devices to convey their needs and desires in social, educational, and vocational situations. Users with limited motor control or literacy often choose to use icon-based devices that afford increased speed of message formulation at the cost of fully generative langu...

A feedback perturbation paradigm was used to investigate whether prosodic cues are controlled independently or in an integrated fashion during sentence production. Twenty-one healthy speakers of American English were asked to produce sentences with emphatic stress while receiving real-time auditory feedback of their productions. The fundamental fre...

We present a method for displaying prosody, the melody of speech, to aid beginning readers with fluent oral reading. We build on proven auditory techniques by manipulating and augmenting text in children's stories. The acoustic properties of a fluent recording are used to construct visualizations of pitch, loudness and length variations in read sam...

This study assessed the effectiveness of software designed to facilitate expressive oral reading through text manipulations that convey prosody. The software presented stories in standard (S) and manipulated formats corresponding to variations in fundamental frequency (F), intensity (I), duration (D), and combined cues (C) indicating modulation of...

Recent studies suggest that speakers with dysarthria may be able to manipulate prosodic features sufficiently to convey information. Leveraging prosodic cues as an alternative or augmentative communication (AAC) signal may allow some individuals with dysarthria to use their vocalizations to engage in richer and more efficient interactions. As an in...

This study sought to examine whether reduced speaking rate impacts listener comprehension of prosodic information in utterances produced by speakers with dysarthria (N = 7) and healthy controls (N = 7). Forty-two English-speaking adults were recruited for the listening task in the present study. Spoken samples were acquired in a previous production...

The present study examined articulator movement changes associated with the production of sentential focus in 4, 7 and 11-year-old children and adults. A facial capture system was used to track jaw, lower lip and upper lip movements while words were produced with and without focus in phrase-final and non-final positions. Adults produced focused wor...

Emerging evidence suggests that treatment of expressive aprosodia is amenable through imitative mechanism-based approaches. Evidence supporting the use of these behavioral treatments has primarily been restricted to perceptual measures. The parallel use of objective acoustic measures and subjective perceptual analyses may reveal added insights into...

Speech synthesis options on assistive communication devices are very limited and do not reflect the user's vocal quality or personality. Previous work suggests that speakers with severe speech impairment can control prosodic aspects of their voice, and often retain the ability to produce sustained vowel-like utterances. This project leverages these...

Parallel isolated word corpora were collected from healthy speakers and individuals with speech impairment due to stroke or cerebral palsy. Surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals were collected for both vocalized and mouthed speech production modes. Pioneering work on disordered speech recognition using the acoustic signal, the sEMG signals, and...

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) users with severe dysarthria may benefit greatly from using residual vocalizations to enhance communication efficiency and naturalness. Many individuals use their residual vocal control to gain attention, express emotions, and convey intentions to familiar care givers. This research was designed to t...

The present study sought to characterize dysarthric speech in terms of acoustic landmarks. Landmark analysis provides a means to relate acoustic events to underlying articulatory behavior thereby allowing for comparisons between highly intelligible speech and dysarthric speech along a set of distinct acoustic parameters. Automatic landmark detectio...

Several recent studies have shown that speakers with severe dysarthria can make use of prosody to communicate intentions. Patel and Salata (2006) investigated the abilities of five children with severe dysarthria to convey three pitch levels and three duration lengths to their caregivers, using an interactive computer game. In this extension study,...

Speakers with dysarthria who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) aids may rely on text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis as their means of interaction. Despite a variety of voices, clinicians tend to use the adult male voice given its superior intelligibility. While this practice may facilitate effective communication, it may come at the e...

Acquisition of prosodic control appears to evolve across development with younger children relying on durational cues and older children utilizing a broader spectrum of cues including fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. This study aimed to determine whether unfamiliar listeners could identify prosodic contrasts produced by 4-, 7-, and 1...

The population with severe speech and motor impairments (SSMI) depend solely on the Augmentative and Alternative Communication Techniques (AAC) for their education and communication needs. Unfortunately, the AAC tools are expensive with respect to the Indian people and the language being English is not usable by the majority of the population. Also...

In this study, the authors sought to understand acoustic and perceptual cues to contrastive stress in speakers with dysarthria (DYS) and healthy controls (HC). The production experiment examined the ability of 12 DYS (9 male, 3 female; M=39 years of age) and 12 age- and gender-matched HC (9 male, 3 female; M=37.5 years of age) to signal contrastive...

The Lombard effect describes the tendency for speakers to increase pitch, intensity, and duration in the presence of noise. It is unclear whether these modifications are uniformly applied across all words within an utterance or whether information-bearing content words are further enhanced compared with function words. In the present study, the aut...

Familiarity is thought to aid listeners in decoding disordered speech; however, as the speech signal degrades, the "familiarity advantage" becomes less beneficial. Despite highly unintelligible speech sound production, many children with dysarthria vocalize when interacting with familiar caregivers. Perhaps listeners can understand these vocalizati...

Hird, K., & Hennessey, N. W. (2007). Facilitating use of speech recognition software for people with disabilities: A comparison of three treatments. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 21, 211-226.

Contrastive stress drills are often used in intervention for dysarthria. These skills are usually not addressed, however, until the speaker has achieved a base level of segmental clarity. In addition to reducing monotony and improving naturalness, contrastive stress has been observed to increase articulatory displacement, which may impact segmental...

This study explored the relationship between articulator movement and prosody in children at different developmental ages. Jaw, lower lip, and upper lip kinematics were examined in 4-, 7-, and 11-year-old children as they produced the declarative and interrogative forms of utterances "Show Bob a bot" and "Show Pop a pot." Articulator movement diffe...

Current speech synthesis technology is difficult to understand in everyday noise situations. Although there is a significant body of work on how humans modify their speech in noise, the results have yet to be implemented in a synthesizer. Algorithms capable of processing and incorporating these modifications may lead to improved speech intelligibil...

Prosodic features of the speech signal include fundamental frequency (F0), intensity and duration. In order to study the development of prosody independent from segmental aspects of speech, we considered the question–statement contrast. In English, adults mark the contrast using changes in fundamental frequency, duration and intensity, with F0 bein...

The Human Speechome Project is an e! ort to observe and computationally model the longitudinal course of language development for a single child at an unprece- dented scale. The idea is this: Instrument a child's home so that nearly everything the child hears and sees from birth to three is recorded. Develop a computa- tional model of language lear...

We present an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) training program provided to 20 special education teachers in a Palestinian Arab community in Israel. The training program consisted of didactic workshops interleaved with on-site supervision. Instructional goals included creating awareness, imparting knowledge, and assisting teachers t...

Empirical data on the acoustics of prosodic control in children is limited, particularly for linguistically contrastive tasks. Twelve children aged 4, 7, and 11 years were asked to produce two utterances ``Show Bob a bot'' (voiced consonants) and ``Show Pop a pot'' (voiceless consonants) 10 times each with emphasis placed on the second word (Bob/Po...

Recent studies have documented that adults with cerebral palsy can control prosodic features such as pitch, loudness, and duration despite severely impaired segmental control. Although their productions are restricted in range, they are able to modulate prosody within that narrowed range. This control has been demonstrated for isolated vowel produc...

Studies of prosodic control in severe dysarthria (DYS) have focused on differences between impaired and nonimpaired speech in terms of the range and variation of fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration. Whether individuals with severe DYS can adequately signal prosodic contrasts and which acoustic cues they use to do so has received far...

Speakers with severe dysarthria are known to have reduced range in prosody. Consistent control within that range, however, has largely been ignored. In earlier investigations speakers with severe dysarthria were able to control pitch and duration for sustained vowel production despite reduced flexibility of control (Patel, 1998). The present experi...

The acoustics of prosodic control in children was studied in 4-, 7-, and 11-year olds using the question-statement contrast. Each child produced the utterances ``Show Bob a bot'' (voiced consonants) and ``Show Pop a pot'' (voiceless consonants) ten times each as a question and ten times each as a statement. A total of 40 utterances were analyzed pe...

While there is a significant body of work on how people modify their speech patterns in the presence of noise, the role of semantic information on these acoustic modifications is not well understood. This study examined whether adult speakers of English differentially modify semantically salient versus nonsalient words within a sentence in the pres...

Standard interfaces including keyboards, mice and speech recognizers pose a major obstacle for individuals with severe speech and physical disabilities. A person with insufficient control of their hands or voice will be unable to efficiently use such interfaces. We are investigating teachable interfaces, which can adapt to the preferences and abili...