The TYPALOC Corpus: A Collection of Various Dysarthric Speech Recordings in Read and Spontaneous Styles

Abstract : This paper presents the TYPALOC corpus of French Dysarthric and Healthy speech and the rationale underlying its constitution. The objective is to compare phonetic variation in the speech of dysarthric vs. healthy speakers in different speech conditions (read and unprepared speech). More precisely, we aim to compare the extent, types and location of phonetic variation within these different populations and speech conditions. The TYPALOC corpus is constituted of a selection of 28 dysarthric patients (three different pathologies) and of 12 healthy control speakers recorded while reading the same text and in a more natural continuous speech condition. Each audio signal has been segmented into Inter-Pausal Units. Then, the corpus has been manually transcribed and automatically aligned. The alignment has been corrected by an expert phonetician. Moreover, the corpus benefits from an automatic syllabification and an Automatic Detection of Acoustic Phone-Based Anomalies. Finally, in order to interpret phonetic variations due to pathologies, a perceptual evaluation of each patient has been conducted. Quantitative data are provided at the end of the paper.