Paper ID: 2403.02371

NeuroVoz: a Castillian Spanish corpus of parkinsonian speech

Janaína Mendes-Laureano, Jorge A. Gómez-García, Alejandro Guerrero-López, Elisa Luque-Buzo, Julián D. Arias-Londoño, Francisco J. Grandas-Pérez, Juan I. Godino-Llorente

The advancement of Parkinson's Disease (PD) diagnosis through speech analysis is hindered by a notable lack of publicly available, diverse language datasets, limiting the reproducibility and further exploration of existing research. In response to this gap, we introduce a comprehensive corpus from 108 native Castilian Spanish speakers, comprising 55 healthy controls and 53 individuals diagnosed with PD, all of whom were under pharmacological treatment and recorded in their medication-optimized state. This unique dataset features a wide array of speech tasks, including sustained phonation of the five Spanish vowels, diadochokinetic tests, 16 listen-and-repeat utterances, and free monologues. The dataset emphasizes accuracy and reliability through specialist manual transcriptions of the listen-and-repeat tasks and utilizes Whisper for automated monologue transcriptions, making it the most complete public corpus of Parkinsonian speech, and the first in Castillian Spanish. NeuroVoz is composed by 2,903 audio recordings averaging $26.88 \pm 3.35$ recordings per participant, offering a substantial resource for the scientific exploration of PD's impact on speech. This dataset has already underpinned several studies, achieving a benchmark accuracy of 89% in PD speech pattern identification, indicating marked speech alterations attributable to PD. Despite these advances, the broader challenge of conducting a language-agnostic, cross-corpora analysis of Parkinsonian speech patterns remains an open area for future research. This contribution not only fills a critical void in PD speech analysis resources but also sets a new standard for the global research community in leveraging speech as a diagnostic tool for neurodegenerative diseases.

Submitted: Mar 4, 2024