Le voyage d’Alice: A standardized reading passage for speech and voice assessment in French. Le voyage d’Alice : un texte standardisé pour l’évaluation de la parole et de la voix en Français.

Background: Reading passages allow the observation of target stimuli in a controlled manner while maximizing the ecological aspects of a speech and voice assessment. Objective: This article presents a new standardized reading passage titled “Le voyage d’Alice” (“Alice's Journey”) and an automated protocol for the extraction of acoustic measures. Methods: The passage was constructed using a comprehensive set of criteria, taking into account data from the literature, specific needs identified in scientific research and in French-speaking clinical practice, and data from an international consensus study. Results: This passage was found to be easy to read and usable for the assessment of articulation of speech sounds, prosodic variations and phonatory behavior, as well as fluency, in Belgium, France, and Canada. The automated acoustic feature extraction protocol allows for a quick and simple analysis of reproducible data. It is a tool adapted for both scientific research and daily clinical practice. Acoustic measures were extracted from the passage in healthy participants in France and are used as reference values.