NeuroVoz: a Castillian Spanish corpus of parkinsonian speech

TL;DR

NeuroVoz is a new publicly available Castilian Spanish speech corpus from Parkinson's patients and controls, enabling improved research and screening of PD through diverse speech tasks and detailed annotations.

Contribution

This paper introduces NeuroVoz, the first extensive Castilian Spanish speech dataset for Parkinson's research, including diverse speech tasks and expert voice quality assessments.

Findings

Achieved 89% accuracy in PD screening using the dataset.

Provides a comprehensive resource for studying PD effects on speech.

Supports future cross-lingual and cross-corpora analyses.

Abstract

The screening of Parkinson's Disease (PD) through speech is hindered by a notable lack of publicly available datasets in different languages. This fact limits the reproducibility and further exploration of existing research. To address this gap, this manuscript presents the NeuroVoz corpus consisting of 112 native Castilian-Spanish speakers, including 58 healthy controls and 54 individuals with PD, all recorded in ON state. The corpus showcases a diverse array of speech tasks: sustained vowels; diadochokinetic tests; 16 Listen-and-Repeat utterances; and spontaneous monologues. The dataset is also complemented with subjective assessments of voice quality performed by an expert according to the GRBAS scale (Grade/Roughness/Breathiness/Asthenia/Strain), as well as annotations with a thorough examination of phonation quality, intensity, speed, resonance, intelligibility, and prosody. The corpus offers a substantial resource for the exploration of the impact of PD on speech. This data set has already supported several studies, achieving a benchmark accuracy of 89% for the screening of PD. Despite these advances, the broader challenge of conducting a language-agnostic, cross-corpora analysis of Parkinsonian speech patterns remains open.