Dysarthria is characterized by distorted speech due to imprecise articulation of phonemes and monotonic or excessive variation of loudness and pitch. While production errors are generally not random, they are commonly characterized as distorted, noisy, or non-prototypical versions of normal production, or as phonemic substitution, which is less common. I have investigated the acoustic, articulatory and perceptual characteristics of dysarthric speech. Studies include a frequency analysis of consonant articulation errors with respect to phonological categories and a speaker’s intelligibility, a kinematic analysis of tongue movement control, and acoustic and perceptual analyses of vowels, lexical stress and fricatives in dysarthria. The outcome of these studies reveals the characteristics of articulation errors, and helps clinicians base their decisions on objective data and maximize the efficiency of clinical treatments.