Idiosyncratic Versus Normative Modeling of Atypical Speech Recognition: Dysarthric Case Studies

Abstract: State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models like Whisper, perform poorly on atypical speech, such as that produced by individuals with dysarthria. Past works for atypical speech have mostly investigated fully personalized (or idiosyncratic) models, but modeling strategies that can both generalize and handle idiosyncracy could be more effective for capturing atypical speech. To investigate this, we compare four strategies: (a) $\textit{normative}$ models trained on typical speech (no personalization), (b) $\textit{idiosyncratic}$ models completely personalized to individuals, (c) $\textit{dysarthric-normative}$ models trained on other dysarthric speakers, and (d) $\textit{dysarthric-idiosyncratic}$ models which combine strategies by first modeling normative patterns before adapting to individual speech. In this case study, we find the dysarthric-idiosyncratic model performs better than idiosyncratic approach while requiring less than half as much personalized data (36.43 WER with 128 train size vs 36.99 with 256). Further, we found that tuning the speech encoder alone (as opposed to the LM decoder) yielded the best results reducing word error rate from 71% to 32% on average. Our findings highlight the value of leveraging both normative (cross-speaker) and idiosyncratic (speaker-specific) patterns to improve ASR for underrepresented speech populations.