Towards Speech Impairment Prediction in German-Speaking Individuals with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

2026-06-16

AI Summary

This study presents the first investigation into predicting clinical speech impairment scores in German-speaking patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) using repetitive speech tasks, such as /da/-/da/ and /da/-/ba/. The authors developed both cross-subject and personalized speech models, evaluating their performance with the Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC). In a cohort of 66 patients, the models achieved CCC values of 0.62 for cross-subject prediction and 0.86 for personalized prediction. These results demonstrate the efficacy of repetitive speech tasks for assessing ALS-related dysarthria and contribute to the standardization of German ALS speech data collection. The work provides both methodological support and empirical evidence for the development of automated clinical speech assessment tools in ALS.

Abstract

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease, often affecting speech due to bulbar dysfunction. In this study, we predict speech impairment in people with ALS (pwALS) using two clinical speech-related scores. We evaluate cross-sectional (across speakers) and personalised (within-speaker) modelling paradigms and analyse the utility of common speech tasks to contribute to the standardisation of speech data collection for pwALS. Experiments on a German-speaking cohort of 66 pwALS show that repetition tasks (/da/-/da/, /da/-/ba/) achieved the best cross-sectional performance (Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) = 0.62) for predicting the Quality of Life in the Dysarthric Speaker questionnaire, while the within-speaker setting reached a CCC of 0.86. This study represents an initial step towards speech impairment prediction in German-speaking pwALS and highlights the potential of automated speech analysis as a supportive tool for speech impairment assessment.

Problem

• Speech Impairment Prediction
• Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
• Dysarthria
• German-speaking
• Bulbar Dysfunction

Innovation

• speech impairment prediction
• personalised modelling
• cross-sectional modelling
• ALS
• automated speech analysis