14
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: not found
      • Article: not found

      Vowel Articulation in Parkinson's Disease

      , ,
      Journal of Voice
      Elsevier BV

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The aim of the study was to analyze vowel articulation in Parkinson's disease (PD) speakers suffering from mild hypokinetic dysarthria as compared with healthy controls in correlation to net speech rate (NSR) and intonation variability (F(0)SD). Furthermore, we intended to reveal possible correlations among vowel articulation, global motor performance, and stage of disease. We examined 68 PD patients (34 male) with mild dysarthria (1 point according to the "speech" item 18 of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale/UPDRS-III) and 32 age-matched control persons (16 male) using a reading task with subsequent acoustical analysis. F1 and F2 frequency values of the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ were extracted from defined words within the text. Description of vowel articulation was based on measures of triangular vowel space area (tVSA) and Vowel Articulation Index (VAI). PD patients were scored according to UPDRS-III and Hoehn and Yahr stages. VAI values were significantly reduced in male and female PD patients as compared with the accordant control group, whereas tVSA was only reduced in the male PD speakers. NSR was negatively correlated to tVSA and VAI only in female PD speakers. No correlations were seen between vowel articulation and UPDRS-III and stage of disease. VAI seem to be superior to tVSA in the description of impaired vowel articulation in PD. Reduced VAI could be detected in male and female parkinsonian speakers suffering only from mild dysarthria with preserved speech intelligibility and therefore might be applicable to identify subclinical changes of vowel articulation. Moreover, some aspects of altered speech performance in PD seem to feature some gender-specific patterns, which justify further investigation. Copyright © 2011 The Voice Foundation. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Journal of Voice
          Journal of Voice
          Elsevier BV
          08921997
          July 2011
          July 2011
          : 25
          : 4
          : 467-472
          Article
          10.1016/j.jvoice.2010.01.009
          20434876
          cd40befa-2a8e-49b8-9455-d1f42374be86
          © 2011

          https://www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/

          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article