Blurb:

This chapter endeavors to analyze the results of the two experiments together in order to address the final aim of this study: to describe the prosodic and acoustic characteristics of dysarthric speech that is rated either highly natural or unnatural. In order to address this goal, speech samples were first ranked most and least natural for each speaker, then the acoustic correlates of prosody of each of these samples were investigated.


In order to rank which speech samples were rated most and least natural overall for each speaker, naturalness ratings from all reliable judges were first averaged for each sample. Then the averaged naturalness ratings per sample were ranked from lowest to highest for each subject. The acoustic characteristics of the top and bottom third of all ranked samples for each subject, the most and least natural overall rated samples respectively, will be discussed shortly.