Dysarthria

About: Dysarthria is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2402 publications have been published within this topic receiving 56554 citations.

A distinct variant of mixed dysarthria reflects parkinsonism and dystonia due to ephedrone abuse.

Abstract: A distinctive alteration of speech has been reported in patients suffering from ephedrone-induced parkinsonism. However, an objective assessment of dysarthria has not been performed in ephedrone users. We studied 28 young Caucasian men from Georgia with a previous history of ephedrone abuse and compared them to 25 age-matched healthy controls. Speech examination, brain MRI, and NNIPPS-Parkinson plus scale were performed in all patients. The accurate differential diagnosis of dysarthria subtypes was based on the quantitative acoustic analyses of 15 speech dimensions. We revealed a distinct variant of mixed dysarthria with a combination of hyperkinetic and hypokinetic components representing the altered motor programming of dystonia and bradykinesia in ephedrone-induced parkinsonism. According to acoustic analyses, all patients presented at least one affected speech dimension, whereas dysarthria was moderate in 43 % and severe in 36 % of patients. Further findings indicated relationships between motor subscores of dystonia and bradykinesia and speech components of loudness (r = −0.54, p < 0.01), articulation (r = 0.40, p < 0.05), and timing (r = −0.53, p < 0.01). In ephedrone-induced parkinsonism a prominent mixed hyperkinetic–hypokinetic dysarthria occurs that appears related to marked dystonia and bradykinesia and probably reflects manganese induced toxic and neurodegenerative damage to the globus pallidus internus and substantia nigra.

Variability in speech dyspraxia.

Abstract: In a volume dedicated to Professor Crystal, this study takes up some remarks of his (1982) regarding definitions of disorders and use of day-to-day clinical data. The topic chosen relates to the notion of variability in speech dyspraxia. Several different uses of the term are noted, but the one used in this paper focuses on variability of errors in a given word on a repeated-trials task. This task was employed to investigate whether, as previously claimed, speech dyspraxics differ from other pronunciation-disordered groups in terms of error variability. Results indicate that as a group they differ from spastic dysarthrics, but not from phonemic paraphasic speakers. On an individual basis, divisions are not as clearcut. Implications for assessment and speech production are considered in the light of this.

Range and Precision of Formant Movement in Pediatric Dysarthria

Abstract: Purpose This study aimed to improve understanding of speech characteristics associated with dysarthria in children with cerebral palsy by analyzing segmental and global formant measures in single-w...

A multi-smartwatch system for assessing speech characteristics of people with dysarthria in group settings

Abstract: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) frequently use vocal exercises in the treatment of patients with speech disorders. Patients receive treatment in a clinical setting and need to practice outside of the clinical setting to generalize speech goals to functional communication. In this paper, we describe the development of technology that captures mixed speech signals in a group setting and allows the SLP to analyze the speech signals relative to treatment goals. The mixed speech signals are blindly separated into individual signals that are preprocessed before computation of loudness, pitch, shimmer, jitter, semitone standard deviation and sharpness. The proposed method has been previously validated on data obtained from clinical trials of people with Parkinson disease and healthy controls.