Temporal speech parameters
What Speech Gap actually measures: the timing structure of spontaneous speech, rather than its content.
The measurement family
Temporal speech parameters describe how someone speaks over time — speaking rate, articulation rate, how often pauses occur, how long they last, and how speech and silence alternate. They are extracted from a short spontaneous-speech sample and require no linguistic interpretation of what was said.
This is what makes them attractive for repeated clinical measurement: they are low-burden, language-portable in principle, and do not require a clinician to be present or a transcript to be produced.
Cross-language validation
Kálmán et al., Temporal Speech Parameters Detect Mild Cognitive Impairment in Different Languages: Validation and Comparison of the Speech-GAP Test in English and Hungarian (DOI) is the key reference for sensitivity across two languages with different structure — one resource-rich, one less-resourced. This connects directly to Gábor Gosztolya’s broader research programme on the linguistic resource gap.
Complementary linguistic features
The BPD narrative-speech study (Felletár et al., DOI) linked linguistic formulation to silent and filled pauses within the BPD group. That result is what motivates combining temporal parameters with linguistic features:
- self-reference (first-person singular use)
- content-word density
- pronoun use
- syntactic complexity
- task context
This combination is specific to the BPD case and is a research direction, not an implemented feature set. → Borderline personality disorder
The pause taxonomy problem
Current Speech Gap software collapses several distinct events into “silence.” The planned extension separates them:
| Event | Currently | Planned |
|---|---|---|
| Silence | silence | silence |
| Inhalation | treated as silence | distinguished |
| Exhalation | treated as silence | distinguished |
| Filled pause | partly handled | distinguished |
| Speech | speech | speech |
| Uncertain interval | — | explicitly labelled |
→ Respiratory signal extension
Related pages
Speech Gap · Respiratory signal extension · Longitudinal within-person measurement · Gábor Gosztolya · Borderline personality disorder