Dysarthria

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

Cognitive Determinants of Dysarthria in Parkinson's Disease: An Automated Machine Learning Approach.

Abstract: Background Dysarthric symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD) vary greatly across cohorts. Abundant research suggests that such heterogeneity could reflect subject-level and task-related cognitive factors. However, the interplay of these variables during motor speech remains underexplored, let alone by administering validated materials to carefully matched samples with varying cognitive profiles and combining automated tools with machine learning methods. Objective We aimed to identify which speech dimensions best identify patients with PD in cognitively heterogeneous, cognitively preserved, and cognitively impaired groups through tasks with low (reading) and high (retelling) processing demands. Methods We used support vector machines to analyze prosodic, articulatory, and phonemic identifiability features. Patient groups were compared with healthy control subjects and against each other in both tasks, using each measure separately and in combination. Results Relative to control subjects, patients in cognitively heterogeneous and cognitively preserved groups were best discriminated by combined dysarthric signs during reading (accuracy = 84% and 80.2%). Conversely, patients with cognitive impairment were maximally discriminated from control subjects when considering phonemic identifiability during retelling (accuracy = 86.9%). This same pattern maximally distinguished between cognitively spared and impaired patients (accuracy = 72.1%). Also, cognitive (executive) symptom severity was predicted by prosody in cognitively preserved patients and by phonemic identifiability in cognitively heterogeneous and impaired groups. No measure predicted overall motor dysfunction in any group. Conclusions Predominant dysarthric symptoms appear to be best captured through undemanding tasks in cognitively heterogeneous and preserved cohorts and through cognitively loaded tasks in patients with cognitive impairment. Further applications of this framework could enhance dysarthria assessments in PD. © 2021 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.

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

Abstract: 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.

Dysarthria and Quality of Life in neurologically healthy elderly and patients with Parkinson's disease Disartria e Qualidade de Vida em idosos neurologicamente sadios e pacientes com doença de Parkinson

Abstract: Purpose: To compare the speech and voice of Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients and neurologically healthy elderly adults (control group, CG), to find out whether these features are related to the disease or the normal aging process, and investigate the impact that dysarthria has on the Quality of Life (QoL) of these individuals. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study involving 25 individuals, 13 patients with PD and 12 CG. All the participants underwent vocal assessment, perceptual and acoustic analysis, based on “Dysarthria Assessment Protocol” and analysis of QoL using a questionnaire, “Living with Dysarthria”. The data underwent statistical analysis to compare the groups in each parameter. Results: In the assessment of dysarthria, patients with PD showed differences in prosody parameter (p=0.012), at the habitual frequency for females (p=0.025) and males (p=0.028), and the extent of intensity (p=0.039) when compared to CG. In QoL questionnaire, it was observed that patients with PD showed more negative impact on the QoL compared to CG, as indicated by the total score (p=0.005) with various aspects influencing this result. Conclusion: The degree of modification of speech and voice of patients with PD resembles those seen in normal aging process, with the exception of prosody and the habitual frequency, which are related to the greatest negative impact on the QoL of patients with PD.

Improving the intelligibility of dysarthric speech towards enhancing the effectiveness of speech therapy

Abstract: Dysarthria is a neuro-motor disorder in which the muscles used for speech production and articulation are severely affected. Dysarthric patients are characterized by slow or slurred speech that is difficult to understand. This work aims at enhancing the intelligibility of dysarthric speech towards developing an effective speech therapy tool. In this therapy tool, enhanced speech is used for providing auditory feedback with a delay to instill confidence in the patients, so that they can improve their speech intelligibility gradually through relearning. Feature level transformation techniques based on linear predictive coding (LPC) coefficient mapping and frequency warping of LPC poles are experimented in this work. Speech utterances from Nemours dataset with mild and moderate dysarthria are used to study the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. The quality of the transformed speech is evaluated using subjective and objective measures. A significant improvement in the intelligibility of speech was observed. Our method henceforth could be used to enhance the effectiveness of speech therapy, by encouraging the dysarthric patients talk more, thus helping in their fast rehabilitation.

Relationship Between Prosody and Intelligibility in Children with Dysarthria.

Abstract: Exaggerated and redundant prosodic cue use has been noted among adults with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (CP) (Patel, 2004; van Doorn & Sheard, 2001). A possible explanation may be that speakers heighten prosodic contrasts to increase intelligibility. The current work examined whether children with dysarthria due to CP also produce exaggerated prosodic contours and if so, how prosodic cue use in these speakers impacts intelligibility. Acoustic analyses were conducted on a previously collected dataset of 2-7 word utterances produced by fourteen children with CP (7 with dysarthria and 7 without) (Hustad, Gorton & Lee, 2010). The dataset also included sentence-level transcriptions obtained from five listeners per speaker. Word intelligibility scores were derived from these transcripts and used to determine whether prosodic modulation differed for words with high versus low intelligibility. Although mean fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity range were similar across groups, words produced by children with dysarthria were slower and more variable in F0 than the group without dysarthria. Moreover, intelligibility decreased when children with dysarthria increased F0 and duration beyond the range used by children without dysarthria. Thus findings suggest that interventions targeting appropriate prosody may be beneficial in improving intelligibility in children with dysarthria and CP.