Acoustic characteristics of Italian Parkinsonian speech: a study on early-stage patients
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0029/000444Keywords:
Parkinson’s disease, language pathology, acoustic analysis, speech rhythm, early diagnosisAbstract
Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a neurological illness which also has effects on speech production, resulting in segmental and suprasegmental abnormalities. The aim of the current study is to test the validity of two acoustic parameters - %V and VtoV - for the detection of rhythmical variation in early-stage PD speech, in comparison to healthy speech. 40 Italian native speakers were enrolled in the research, 20 early-stage PD subjects and 20 neurologically healthy and matched controls, and a corpus of read speech was collected. The results of voice analysis confirmed an alteration of vocalic duration and %V in PD productions. In particular, %V could be a reliable cue for PD speech characterization, even at the very early onset of the disease.
References
Boersma, P., Weenink, D. 2020. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.1.20beta, retrieved 10 September 2020 from [http://www.praat.org/](http://www.praat.org/).
de Lau, L. M., Breteler, M.M. 2006. Epidemiology of Parkinson’s disease. Lancet Neurol 5, 525–535.
Gibb, W.R., Lees, A.J. 1988. A comparison of clinical and pathological features of young- and old-onset Parkinson's disease. Neurology 38, 1402–1406.
Harel, B.T., Cannizzaro, M.S., Cohen, H., Reilly, N., Snyder, P.J. 2004. Acoustic characteristics of Parkinsonian speech: a potential biomarker of early disease progression and treatment. Journal of Neurolinguistics 17, 439–453.
Liss, J.M., White, L., Mattys, S.L., Lansford, K., Lotto, A.J., Spitzer, S.M., Caviness, J.N. 2009. Quantifying speech rhythm abnormalities in the dysarthrias. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 52, 1334–1352.
Pettorino, M., Busà, M.G., Pellegrino, E. 2016. Speech Rhythm in Parkinson’s Disease: A Study on Italian. Proc. of the 17th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, San Francisco, USA, 1958-1961.
Pettorino, M., Gu, W., Półrola, P., Fan, P. 2017. Rhythmic Characteristics of Parkinsonian Speech: A Study on Mandarin and Polish. Proc. of the 18th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Stockholm, Sweden, 3172-3176.
Skodda, S., Gronheit, W., Schlegel, U. 2012. Impairment of vowel articulation as a possible marker of disease progression in Parkinson’s Disease, PLoS ONE 7/2, 1-8.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
