[Acoustic analysis of the articulatory disorders of patients affected by peripheral facial paralysis].

Abstract

Introduction: The study of joint disorders in facial paralysis is an important element of support to guide rehabilitation.

Material: The material used for the registration of the database is a digital recorder Zoom H4N (way format, sample rate 44,100 Hz, 16 bit quantization). The microphone used is a Shure Beta 58, super cardioid. All recordings are made in a specific room.

Methods: The annotation of the corpus is done using Praat software and its plug-in EasyAlign order to achieve alignment phonetics.

Results: High frequency power ratio (HPR) is a good indicator of the setting in motion of the articulators as the number of explosions of bilabial phoneme was significantly related to the motor of the face and lips, and the score at dynamometer. The VOT was significantly shorter in patients with grade IV and V-VI than in control subjects. The results highlight a significant difference between the values of F3for the vowels /i/ and /y/, depending on the severity of the damage. There is even, for the most severe grades, there are a hundred Hertz difference between F3 of /i/ and that of /y/, which means that these two vowels becomes impossible to discriminate.

Conclusions: If these functional disorders are much discomfort for patients, however, these are not speaking of articulatory disorder in the strict sense, according to the definition of Borel Maisonny. We must therefore focus more specifically to the acoustic analysis of speech in order to check for spectral indices likely to identify these disorders.