Acoustic Indicators of Speech Motor Coordination in Adults With and Without Traumatic Brain Injury
(Oral presentation)
| Tanya Talkar (Harvard University, USA), Nancy Pearl Solomon (Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, USA), Douglas S. Brungart (Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, USA), Stefanie E. Kuchinsky (Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, USA), Megan M. Eitel (Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, USA), Sara M. Lippa (Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, USA), Tracey A. Brickell (Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, USA), Louis M. French (Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, USA), Rael T. Lange (Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, USA), Thomas F. Quatieri (Harvard University, USA) |
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A traumatic brain injury (TBI) can lead to various long-term effects on memory, attention, and mood, as well as the occurrence of headaches, speech, and hearing problems. There is a need to better understand the long-term effects of a TBI for objective tracking of an individual’s recovery, which could be used to determine intervention trajectories. This study utilizes acoustic features derived from recordings of speech tasks completed by active-duty service members and veterans (SMVs) enrolled in the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury (DVBIC)/Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence (TBICoE) 15-Year Longitudinal TBI Study. We hypothesize that the individuals diagnosed with moderate to severe TBI would demonstrate motor speech impairments through decreased coordination of the speech production subsystems as compared to individuals with no history of TBI. Speech motor coordination is measured through correlations of acoustic feature time series representing speech subsystems. Eigenspectra derived from these correlations are utilized in machine learning models to discriminate between the two groups. The fusion of correlation features derived from the recordings achieves an AUC of 0.78. This suggests that residual motor impairments from moderate to severe TBI could be detectable through objective measures of speech motor coordination.
