The Department of Telecommunications, Brno University of Technology (Brno, Czech Republic) announces a full-time Ph.D. (doctoral student) position:

Hypokinetic dysarthria (HD) is a motor speech disorder caused by lesions in basal ganglia, usually in the case of Parkinson’s disease. In contrary to HD, apraxia of speech (AOS) is disorder of verbal communication planning or programming, and is caused by lesions in premotor cortex. Although HD and AOS are different speech disorders, they have common symptoms, and they are both manifested in fields of phonation, articulation, prosody and respiration. Therefore, the differential analysis is quite challenging. The aim of this PhD thesis is to research speech parameterization methods that will enable detailed quantification of large range of specific speech disorders and support differential analysis of HD and AOS. The research will be held in cooperation with neurologists and speech therapists from University of Arizona, University of Szeged, St. Anne’s University Hospital in Brno and Central European Institute of Technology.

For more info contact Jiri Mekyska (mekyska@feec.vutbr.cz). Deadline: May 10, 2017.