Repetition Assessment for Speech and Language Disorders: A Study of the Logopenic Variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia

Impaired repetition is a characteristic of several speech and language disorders, including certain variants of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). People with the logopenic variant of PPA (lvPPA) can present with impaired repetition abilities and repetition tasks can be used to distinguish lvPPA speakers from healthy controls. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for quantifying the quality of repetition in speech recordings and demonstrate the utility of the technique by using it to distinguish between healthy speakers and lvPPA speakers. We train several classifiers on features extracted from the repetition recordings. The best classifier distinguishes the lvPPA speakers with impaired repetition from the healthy speakers with 85.7% accuracy and classifies all healthy speakers with perfect accuracy. Although we evaluate the method on lvPPA detection, we believe that the method has potential utility for a range of tasks and speech disorders where repetition occurs.