Relative fundamental frequency during vocal onset and offset in older speakers with and without Parkinson's disease.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Stepp CE
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3606308 | biostudies-other | 2013 Mar
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
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Project description:When a vowel follows an obstruent, the fundamental frequency in the first few tens of milliseconds of the vowel is known to be influenced by the voicing characteristics of the consonant. This influence was re-examined in the study reported here. Stops, fricatives, and the nasal /m/ were paired with the vowels /i,a/ to form CVm syllables. Target syllables were embedded in carrier sentences, and intonation was varied to produce each syllable in either a high, low, or neutral pitch environment. In a high-pitch environment, F0 following voiceless obstruents is significantly increased relative to the baseline /m/, but following voiced obstruents it closely traces the baseline. In a low-pitch environment, F0 is very slightly increased following all obstruents, voiced and unvoiced. It is suggested that for certain pitch environments a conflict can occur between gestures corresponding to the segmental feature [stiff vocal folds] and intonational elements. The results are different acoustic manifestations of [stiff] in different pitch environments. The spreading of the vocal folds that occurs during unvoiced stops in certain contexts in English is an enhancing gesture, which aids the resolution of the gestural conflict by allowing the defining segmental gesture to be weakened without losing perceptual salience.
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Project description:This study investigated the benefits of differences between sentences in fundamental frequency (F0) and temporal onset for sentence pairs among listener groups differing in age and hearing sensitivity. Two experiments were completed with the primary difference between experiments being the way in which the stimuli were presented. Experiment 1 used blocked stimulus presentation, which ultimately provided redundant acoustic cues to mark the target sentence in each pair, whereas Experiment 2 sampled a slightly more restricted stimulus space, but in a completely randomized presentation order. For both experiments, listeners were required to detect a cue word ("Baron") for the target sentence in each pair and to then identify the target words (color, number) that appeared later in the target sentence. Results of Experiment 1 showed that F0 or onset separation cues were beneficial to both cue-word detection and color-number identification performance. There were no significant differences across groups in the ability to detect the cue word, but groups differed in their ability to identify the correct color-number words. Elderly adults with impaired hearing had the greatest difficulty with the identification task despite the application of spectral shaping to restore the audibility of the speech stimuli. For the most part, the primary results of Experiment 1 were replicated in Experiment 2, although, in the latter experiment, all older adults, whether they had normal or impaired hearing, performed worse than young adults with normal hearing. From Experiment 2, the benefits received for a difference in F0 between talkers of 6 semitones were equivalent to those received for an onset asynchrony of 300 ms between sentences and, for such conditions, the combination of both sound-segregation cues resulted in an additive benefit.
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Project description:IntroductionPatients with Parkinson's disease (PD) frequently experience disrupted sleep, and several sleep abnormalities are associated with an increased risk of incident PD. However, there are few data concerning the relationship between objectively quantified sleep disruption and the cardinal histopathological features of PD, especially in individuals without clinical PD.MethodsWe studied 269 older adults without PD who had participated in the Rush Memory and Aging Project and undergone uniform structured neuropathologic evaluations upon death. Sleep fragmentation was measured using actigraphy. Logistic regression models examined the associations of sleep fragmentation proximate to death with the burden of Lewy body pathology and substantia nigra neuron loss.ResultsGreater sleep fragmentation was associated with the presence of Lewy body pathology (odds ratio 1.40; 95% confidence interval 1.05-1.86; P = .02) and substantia nigra neuron loss (odds ratio 1.43; 95% confidence interval 1.10-1.88; P = .008) and a higher odds of a pathological diagnosis of PD (odds ratio 2.04; 95% confidence interval 1.34-3.16; P = .0009). These associations were independent of motor features of parkinsonism, demographic characteristics, and a wide range of medical co-morbidities.ConclusionsSleep fragmentation is associated with PD pathology in older adults without PD. These results suggest that sleep fragmentation may be a marker of or risk factor for PD pathology in older adults without PD. © 2017 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.
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