Title :
Spectro-temporal analysis of speech affected by depression and psychomotor retardation
Author :
Cummins, Nicholas ; Epps, Julien ; Ambikairajah, E.
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Elec. Eng. & Telecomm., Univ. of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Abstract :
To enhance current diagnostic methods used when assessing a depressed individual, an objective screening mechanism, ideally based on non-intrusive behavioral signals, is needed. Given the clinical description of depression speech as `dull, monotonous and flat´ and promising previous results from spectral features, we hypothesize that the effects of depression on speech are embedded in spectro-temporal events. To test this hypothesis we explore different methodologies, based on the modulation spectrum, for extracting long-term spectro-temporal information from speech and assess their suitability as a clinical marker of depression. Results indicate that: depressive speech information is captured in the modulation spectrum, long-term spectro-temporal information is important in depressed speech identification and there are potential differences in the effects that depression and psychomotor retardation have on speech production mechanisms.
Keywords :
medical disorders; psychology; speech processing; clinical marker; depressed speech identification; diagnostic method; modulation spectrum; nonintrusive behavioral signal; objective screening mechanism; psychomotor retardation; spectral feature; spectro-temporal analysis; speech production mechanism; Acoustics; Correlation; Feature extraction; Frequency modulation; Least squares approximations; Speech; Depression; Energy variability; Modulation Spectrum; Psychomotor Retardation; Spectro-Temporal;
Conference_Titel :
Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2013 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Vancouver, BC
DOI :
10.1109/ICASSP.2013.6639129