Potential sports concussion identification using acoustic-phonetic analysis of vowel productions
Terry G. Horner, Michael Stokes · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2014
Concussions impair cognitive function and muscle motor control; however, little is known about how this impairment affects speech production. In the present study, concussed athletes speech is recorded at the initial office visit and subsequent visits. The last recording, when the brain is determined to have recovered using present criteria, becomes the baseline. The vocabulary consists of seven h-vowel-d (hVd) words (who’d, heed, hood, hid, had, hud, and heard) produced three times each for a total of 21 productions. The study is focused on vowel characteristics and the limited coarticulatory effects of the hVd vocabulary make it ideal for the study. Duration measurements are made by experimenter analysis and the formant measurements are made using the automatic speech recognition engine ELBOW. The preliminary comparisons from the subjects completing the protocol show formant drift for three or more of the seven vowels, and duration is affected for each talker and each vowel. These results were anticipated since the impairment would affect articulatory movement and timing. The results as well as a discussion of development of an automated real-time concussion identification application will be presented.