New Spanish speech corpus database for the analysis of people suffering from Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer’s, affecting about 1% of the people older than 65 and about 89% of the people with PD develop different speech disorders. Different researchers are currently working in the analysis of speech of people with PD, including the study of different dimensions in speech such as phonation, articulation,prosody and intelligibility. The study of phonation and articulation has been addressed mainly considering sustained vowels; however, the analysis of prosody and intelligibility requires the inclusion of words, sentences and monologue. In this paper we present a new database with speech recordings of 50 patients with PD and their respective healthy controls, matched by age and gender. All of the participants are Spanish native speakers and the recordings were collected following a protocol that considers both technical requirements and several recommendations given by experts in linguistics, phoniatry and neurology. This corpus includes tasks such as sustained phonations of the vowels, diadochokinetic evaluation, 45 words, 10 sentences, a reading text and a monologue. The paper also includes results of the characterization of the Spanish vowels considering different measures used in other works to characterize different speech impairments.