The paper evaluates whether audio‑language models can use multimodal clinical context to improve dysarthric speech recognition. Using a benchmark built on the Speech Accessibility Project dataset, the authors test diagnosis labels, clinician ratings, and detailed clinical descriptions as prompts for nine models. They find that these prompts yield negligible or negative effects on word error rate, though fine‑tuning with LoRA and mixed prompt formats reduces WER by 52% and benefits certain subgroups such as Down syndrome and mild‑severity speakers.
arXiv:2606. 19797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech recognition is crucial for facilitating effective communication among individuals with dysarthria.
arXiv:2603. 15988v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech quality assessment (DSQA) is critical for clinical diagnostics and inclusive speech technologies.
arXiv:2606. 18645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder marked by reduced intelligibility and communicative effectiveness.
arXiv:2607. 21496v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cognitive impairment (CI) is a growing public health concern.
The study evaluates seven parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning (PEFT) methods—LoRA, QLoRA, AdaLoRA, DoRA, LoHA, VeRA, and VB‑LoRA—on two ASR back‑ends (Whisper‑large‑v3 and Qwen3‑ASR‑1.7B) for a single post‑stroke Hungarian male speaker with severe dysarthria. Attention‑projection adapters consistently lower character error rates (CER) on both models, with LoRA emerging as the simplest and most effective choice; QLoRA performs worse and offers no memory advantage at this scale. Full fine‑tuning yields the lowest CER, but a 115 MB LoRA that also adapts feed‑forward blocks achieves comparable accuracy with only 3.7 % of the per‑patient storage, and a 5‑minute enrollment audio captures nearly half of the zero‑shot‑to‑30‑minute CER improvement. whyItMatters":"The paper demonstrates that lightweight PEFT adapters can substantially improve dysarthric ASR performance while keeping storage and computational costs low, offering a practical path for personalized speech recognition in clinical settings."
arXiv:2606. 19791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision.
The paper proposes a linguistically structured multi‑task learning framework for recognizing non‑canonical phonemes by decomposing phoneme prediction into articulatory feature dimensions such as manner, place, and voicing. A hierarchical architecture with task‑specific heads and a cross‑attention fusion module is combined with semi‑supervised Momentum Pseudo‑Labeling and a cascaded training strategy that gradually introduces articulatory tasks. Experiments on the L2‑ARCTIC dataset demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models and produce interpretable error patterns aligned with phonological feature structure.
arXiv:2606. 19793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision.
arXiv:2606. 17826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in non-English clinical settings is challenged by multiscript variability, where the same term may appear in multiple valid orthographic forms.
arXiv:2606. 17339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems.
The paper examines how multilingual medical adaptation affects the internal representations of Whisper ASR models by performing layer‑wise encoder analysis. It compares several adaptation strategies—zero‑shot decoding, English‑only fine‑tuning, German‑only diagnostic fine‑tuning, two‑stage EN→EN+DE continuation, and direct EN+DE fine‑tuning—across different Whisper sizes, finding that fine‑tuning improves performance but the best model varies by setting. Layer‑wise results show that English medical fine‑tuning drives the main encoder shift, while multilingual continuation largely preserves the adapted representation space, with domain and language information remaining recoverable across layers. "whyItMatters":"The study provides insight into how multilingual medical adaptation reshapes Whisper’s internal representations, guiding the selection of model sizes and fine‑tuning strategies for improved MedASR performance."
arXiv:2606. 28445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Early detection of dementia enables timely intervention, and reflecting cognitive impairment, spontaneous speech offers a non-invasive screening modality.