Extending standardized speech analysis across languages: An Italian toolkit for transcription and coding of neurological speech

Abstract Speech and language analysis plays a central role in assessing adult neurological disorders, providing sensitive markers across clinical populations to support diagnosis. Standardized transcription and coding systems are essential to ensure reproducible analyses and enable comparisons across studies and languages. However, practical guidance on adapting such systems for non-English speakers remains limited. This work presents a structured toolkit for adapting speech and language transcription and coding conventions of adult speakers with neurological disorders from English to Italian. The adaptation builds on the CHAT conventions developed within the TalkBank framework. It follows the guiding principles of clarity, readability, and efficiency of data entry, while ensuring linguistic appropriateness for Italian. Original commands and coding options were systematically evaluated and then retained, modified, excluded, or added as needed, with the majority of changes in the coding process reflecting Italian-specific phonetic-phonological and morphosyntactic norms and typical impairment of aphasic production. Beyond providing a ready-to-use Italian manual, this toolkit defines a transparent and replicable framework for cross-linguistic adaptation. The manual was designed as a flexible resource in which users can select coding options guided by specific goals, allowing them to focus on relevant linguistic features at the word or sentence level or across different linguistic domains. By providing linguistically grounded conventions compatible with the TalkBank framework, the Italian Toolkit supports clinically meaningful speech analysis in Italian-speaking adults, and it offers a methodological model for extending standardized annotation systems to other languages.