Self-Reported Symptoms of Depression and PTSD Are Associated with Reduced Vowel Space in Screening Interviews
Self-Reported Symptoms of Depression and PTSD Are Associated with Reduced Vowel Space in Screening Interviews
复制标题
DOI：
10.1109/taffc.2015.2440264
复制
发表时间：
2016-01-01
影响因子：
11.2
通讯作者：
Morency, Louis-Philippe
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Scherer, Stefan;Lucas, Gale M.;Morency, Louis-Philippe
元音产生的频率范围减少是心理和神经障碍患者的一个有充分记录的言语特征。众所周知，抑郁症和创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）等情感障碍会影响运动控制，尤其是语言产生。元音空间减少和表达能力降低的评估和记录通常依赖于主观评估或在受限的实验室条件下对语音的分析（例如持续元音生成，阅读任务）。这些限制使得对这些措施的分析既昂贵又不切实际。在这项工作中，我们研究了一种基于自动无监督机器学习的方法来评估说话者的元音空间。我们的实验是基于253个人的录音。抑郁症和创伤后应激障碍的症状采用标准的自我评估问卷及其截止分数进行评估。实验表明，在问卷调查中得分较高的人，元音空间明显减少。我们展示了该措施的统计稳健性对不同人口统计的个人和发音率。有抑郁症状的受试者元音空间缩小可以用影响发音和运动控制的精神运动迟缓的常见状况来解释。这些发现可能会在未来支持情感障碍的治疗，如抑郁症和创伤后应激障碍。
Reduced frequency range in vowel production is a well documented speech characteristic of individuals with psychological and neurological disorders. Affective disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are known to influence motor control and in particular speech production. The assessment and documentation of reduced vowel space and reduced expressivity often either rely on subjective assessments or on analysis of speech under constrained laboratory conditions (e.g. sustained vowel production, reading tasks). These constraints render the analysis of such measures expensive and impractical. Within this work, we investigate an automatic unsupervised machine learning based approach to assess a speaker's vowel space. Our experiments are based on recordings of 253 individuals. Symptoms of depression and PTSD are assessed using standard self-assessment questionnaires and their cut-off scores. The experiments show a significantly reduced vowel space in subjects that scored positively on the questionnaires. We show the measure's statistical robustness against varying demographics of individuals and articulation rate. The reduced vowel space for subjects with symptoms of depression can be explained by the common condition of psychomotor retardation influencing articulation and motor control. These findings could potentially support treatment of affective disorders, like depression and PTSD in the future.