Acoustic characteristics of vot in plosive consonants produced by parkinson’s patients

Abstract

Voice Onset Time (VOT) has been used as an acoustic measure for a better understanding of the impact of different motor speech disorders in speech production. The purpose of our paper is to present a methodology for the manual measuring of VOT in voiceless plosive sounds and to analyze its suitability to detect specific articulation problems in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients. The experiments are performed with recordings of the diadochokinetic evaluation which consists in the rapid repetition of the syllables /pa-ta-ka/. A total of 50 PD patients and 50 healthy speakers (HC) participated in this study. Manual measurements include VOT values and also duration of the closure phase, duration of the consonant, and the maximum spectral energy during the burst phase. Results indicate that the methodology is consistent and allows the automatic classification between PD patients and healthy speakers with accuracies of up to 77% .