Sensorimotor control of vocal pitch production in Parkinson's disease.

This study examines the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) on communicative efficiency conveyed through prosody. A new assessment method for evaluating productive prosodic skills in Dutch speaking dysarthric patients was devised and tested on 36 individuals (18 controls, 18 PD patients). Three professional listeners judged the intended meanings in four communicative functions of Dutch prosody: Boundary Marking, Focus, Sentence Typing, and Emotional Prosody. Each function was tested through reading and imitation. Interrater agreement was calculated. Results indicated that healthy speakers, compared to PD patients, performed significantly better on imitation of Boundary Marking, Focus, and Sentence Typing. PD patients with a moderate or severe dysarthria performed significantly worse on imitation of Focus than on reading of Focus. No significant differences were found for Emotional Prosody. Judges agreed well on all tasks except Emotional Prosody. Future research will focus on elaborating the assessment and on developing a therapy programme paralleling the assessment.

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Assessment of Prosodic Communicative Efficiency in Parkinson's Disease As Judged by Professional Listeners

Up to 89% of the individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) experience speech problem over the course of the disease. Speech prosody and intelligibility are two of the most affected areas in hypokinetic dysarthria. However, assessment of these areas could potentially be problematic as speech prosody and intelligibility could be affected by the type of speech materials employed. Objective: To comparatively explore the effects of different types of speech stimulus on speech prosody and intelligibility in PD speakers. Methods: Speech prosody and intelligibility of two groups of individuals with varying degree of dysarthria resulting from PD was compared to that of a group of control speakers using sentence reading, passage reading and monologue. Acoustic analysis including measures on fundamental frequency (F0), intensity and speech rate was used to form a prosodic profile for each individual. Speech intelligibility was measured for the speakers with dysarthria using direct magnitude estimation. Results: Difference in F0 variability between the speakers with dysarthria and control speakers was only observed in sentence reading task. Difference in the average intensity level was observed for speakers with mild dysarthria to that of the control speakers. Additionally, there were stimulus effect on both intelligibility and prosodic profile. Conclusions: The prosodic profile of PD speakers was different from that of the control speakers in the more structured task, and lower intelligibility was found in less structured task. This highlighted the value of both structured and natural stimulus to evaluate speech production in PD speakers. © 2015-IOS Press and the authors.

Speech Prosody Across Stimulus Types for Individuals with Parkinson's Disease

Purpose: The aims of this review were to identify and describe the assessment tools that have been developed to assess prosodic skills in children and adults and to evaluate the clinical utility of the tools. Method: Currently available tools were identified through searching 4 online databases and bibliographies of relevant articles and by contacting authors. Results: Nine assessment tools were identified. The tools were appraised for their intended purpose, target population, domains of prosody assessed, validity, reliability, and normative sample data. The purpose of development and the content of the tools were well O

https://pubs.asha.org/doi/pdf/10.1044/cicsd_42_S_138

Behavioral Measures to Evaluate Prosodic Skills: A Review of Assessment Tools for Children and Adults

Purpose The autosegmental–metrical (AM) framework represents an established methodology for intonational analysis in unimpaired speaker populations but has found little application in describing in...

/pdf/characterizing-intonation-deficit-in-motor-speech-disorders-hwuzxsu70w.pdf

Characterizing Intonation Deficit in Motor Speech Disorders: An Autosegmental-Metrical Analysis of Spontaneous Speech in Hypokinetic Dysarthria, Ataxic Dysarthria, and Foreign Accent Syndrome.

Background: Dysprosody is a common feature in speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria. However, speech prosody varies across different types of speech materials. This raises the question of what is the most appropriate speech material for the evaluation of dysprosody.Aims: To characterize the prosodic impairment in Cantonese speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria associated with Parkinson's disease, and to determine the effect of different types of speech stimuli on the perceptual rating of prosody.Methods & Procedures: Speech data in the form of sentence reading, passage reading, and monologue were collected from ten Cantonese speakers with Parkinson's disease. Perceptual analysis was conducted on ten prosodic parameters to evaluate five dimensions of prosody, based on a theoretical framework: pitch, loudness, duration, voice quality, and degree of reduction.Outcomes & Results: The results showed that the most severely affected prosodic parameters were monopitch, harsh voice, and monoloudness, followed by bre...

Katherine S.-K. Cheung

Papers

Dysprosody and stimulus effects in Cantonese speakers with Parkinson's disease.