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Towards Speech Impairment Prediction in German-Speaking Individuals With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

MCML Authors

Björn Schuller

Prof. Dr.

Core PI

Health Informatics

Abstract

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease, often affecting speech due to bulbar dysfunction. In this study, we predict speech impairment in people with ALS (pwALS) using two clinical speech-related scores. We evaluate cross-sectional (across speakers) and personalised (within-speaker) modelling paradigms and analyse the utility of common speech tasks to contribute to the standardisation of speech data collection for pwALS. Experiments on a German-speaking cohort of 66 pwALS show that repetition tasks (/da/-/da/, /da/-/ba/) achieved the best cross-sectional performance (Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) = 0.62) for predicting the Quality of Life in the Dysarthric Speaker questionnaire, while the within-speaker setting reached a CCC of 0.86. This study represents an initial step towards speech impairment prediction in German-speaking pwALS and highlights the potential of automated speech analysis as a supportive tool for speech impairment assessment.

inproceedings GHH+26

Interspeech 2026

27th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association. Sydney, Australia, Sep 27-Oct 01, 2026. To be published. Preprint available.