Parkinson's disease and the effect of lexical factors on vowel articulation.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Watson PJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3908730 | biostudies-other | 2008 Nov
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
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Project description:PurposeThe aim of the current study was to survey if vowel articulation in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) shows specific changes in the course of the disease.Method67 patients with PD (42 male) and 40 healthy speakers (20 male) were tested and retested after an average time interval of 34 months. Participants had to read a given text as source for subsequent calculation of the triangular vowel space area (tVSA) and vowel articulation index (VAI). Measurement of tVSA and VAI were based upon analysis of the first and second formant of the vowels /?/, /i/and /u/ extracted from defined words within the text.ResultsAt first visit, VAI values were reduced in male and female PD patients as compared to the control group, and showed a further decrease at the second visit. Only in female Parkinsonian speakers, VAI was correlated to overall speech impairment based upon perceptual impression. VAI and tVSA were correlated to gait impairment, but no correlations were seen between VAI and global motor impairment or overall disease duration. tVSA showed a similar reduction in the PD as compared to the control group and was also found to further decline between first and second examination in female, but not in male speakers with PD.ConclusionsMeasurement of VAI seems to be superior to tVSA in the description of impaired vowel articulation and its further decline in the course of the disease in PD. Since impairment of vowel articulation was found to be independent from global motor function but correlated to gait dysfunction, measurement of vowel articulation might have a potential to serve as a marker of axial disease progression.
| S-EPMC3289640 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Purpose. To investigate changes in vowel articulation with the electrical deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in dysarthric speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Methods. Eight Quebec-French speakers diagnosed with idiopathic PD who had undergone STN DBS were evaluated ON-stimulation and OFF-stimulation (1 hour after DBS was turned off). Vowel articulation was compared ON-simulation versus OFF-stimulation using acoustic vowel space and formant centralization ratio, calculated with the first (F1) and second formant (F2) of the vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/. The impact of the preceding consonant context on articulation, which represents a measure of coarticulation, was also analyzed as a function of the stimulation state. Results. Maximum vowel articulation increased during ON-stimulation. Analyses also indicate that vowel articulation was modulated by the consonant context but this relationship did not change with STN DBS. Conclusions. Results suggest that STN DBS may improve articulation in dysarthric speakers with PD, in terms of range of movement. Optimization of the electrical parameters for each patient is important and may lead to improvement in speech fine motor control. However, the impact on overall speech intelligibility may still be small. Clinical considerations are discussed and new research avenues are suggested.
| S-EPMC4221888 | biostudies-other
Project description:This study investigates the interaction of lexical access and articulation in spoken word production, examining two dimensions along which theories vary. First, does articulatory variation reflect a fixed plan, or do lexical access-articulatory interactions continue after response initiation? Second, to what extent are interactive mechanisms hard-wired properties of the production system, as opposed to flexible? In two picture-naming experiments, we used semantic neighbor manipulations to induce lexical and conceptual co-activation. Our results provide evidence for multiple sources of interaction, both before and after response initiation. While interactive effects can vary across participants, we do not find strong evidence of variation of effects within individuals, suggesting that these interactions are relatively fixed features of each individual's production system.
| S-EPMC5793891 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Children acquire vowels earlier than consonants, and the former are less vulnerable to speech disorders than the latter. This study explores the hypothesis that a similar contrast exists later in life and that consonants are more vulnerable to ageing than vowels. Data was obtained with two experiments comparing the speech of Younger Adults (YAs) and Middle-aged Adults (MAs). In the first experiment an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system was trained with a balanced corpus of 29 YAs and 27 MAs. The productions of each speaker were obtained in a Spanish language word (W) and non-word (NW) repetition task. The performance of the system was evaluated with the same corpus used for training using a cross validation approach. The ASR system recognized to a similar extent the Ws of both groups of speakers, but it was more successful with the NWs of the YAs than with those of the MAs. Detailed error analysis revealed that the MA speakers scored below the YA speakers for consonants and also for the place and manner of articulation features; the results were almost identical in both groups of speakers for vowels and for the voicing feature. In the second experiment a group of healthy native listeners was asked to recognize isolated syllables presented with background noise. The target speakers were one YA and one MA that had taken part in the first experiment. The results were consistent with those of the ASR experiment: the manner and place of articulation were better recognized, and vowels and voicing were worse recognized, in the YA speaker than in the MA speaker. We conclude that consonant articulation is more vulnerable to ageing than vowel articulation. Future studies should explore whether or not these early and selective changes in articulation accuracy might be caused by changes in speech perception skills (e.g., in auditory temporal processing).
| S-EPMC7652263 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The present study investigated whether lexical frequency, a variable that is known to affect the time taken to utter a verbal response, may also influence articulation. Pairs of words that differed in terms of their relative frequency, but were matched on their onset, vowel, and number of phonemes (e.g., map vs. mat, where the former is more frequent than the latter) were used in a picture naming and a reading aloud task. Low-frequency items yielded slower response latencies than high-frequency items in both tasks, with the frequency effect being significantly larger in picture naming compared to reading aloud. Also, initial-phoneme durations were longer for low-frequency items than for high-frequency items. The frequency effect on initial-phoneme durations was slightly more prominent in picture naming than in reading aloud, yet its size was very small, thus preventing us from concluding that lexical frequency exerts an influence on articulation. Additionally, initial-phoneme and whole-word durations were significantly longer in reading aloud compared to picture naming. We discuss our findings in the context of current theories of reading aloud and speech production, and the approaches they adopt in relation to the nature of information flow (staged vs. cascaded) between cognitive and articulatory levels of processing.
| S-EPMC4606046 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes a progressive impairment in motor and cognitive functions. Although semantic fluency deficits have been described in PD, more specific semantic memory (SM) and lexical availability (LA) domains have not been previously addressed. Here, we aimed to characterize the cognitive performance of PD patients in a set of SM and LA measures and determine the smallest set of neuropsychological (lexical, semantic, or executive) variables that most accurately classify groups. Thirty early-stage non-demented PD patients (age 35-75, 10 females) and thirty healthy controls (age 36-76, 12 females) were assessed via general cognitive, SM [three subtests of the CaGi battery including living (i.e., elephant) and non-living things (i.e., fork)], and LA (eliciting words from 10 semantic categories related to everyday life) measures. Results showed that PD patients performed lower than controls in two SM global scores (picture naming and naming in response to an oral description). This impairment was particularly pronounced in the non-living things subscale. Also, the number of words in the LA measure was inferior in PD patients than controls, in both larger and smaller semantic fields, showing a more inadequate recall strategy. Notably, the classification algorithms indicated that the SM task had high classification accuracy. In particular, the denomination of non-living things had a classification accuracy of ∼80%. These results suggest that frontostriatal deterioration in PD leads to search strategy deficits in SF and the potential disruption in semantic categorization. These findings are consistent with the embodied view of cognition.
| S-EPMC8361833 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Purpose. To investigate the impact of deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN DBS) and levodopa intake on vowel articulation in dysarthric speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Methods. Vowel articulation was assessed in seven Quebec French speakers diagnosed with idiopathic PD who underwent STN DBS. Assessments were conducted on- and off-medication, first prior to surgery and then 1 year later. All recordings were made on-stimulation. Vowel articulation was measured using acoustic vowel space and formant centralization ratio. Results. Compared to the period before surgery, vowel articulation was reduced after surgery when patients were off-medication, while it was better on-medication. The impact of levodopa intake on vowel articulation changed with STN DBS: before surgery, levodopa impaired articulation, while it no longer had a negative effect after surgery. Conclusions. These results indicate that while STN DBS could lead to a direct deterioration in articulation, it may indirectly improve it by reducing the levodopa dose required to manage motor symptoms. These findings suggest that, with respect to speech production, STN DBS and levodopa intake cannot be investigated separately because the two are intrinsically linked. Along with motor symptoms, speech production should be considered when optimizing therapeutic management of patients with PD.
| S-EPMC4617696 | biostudies-other
Project description:Objectives: Mandarin-speaking users of cochlear implants (CI) perform poorer than their English counterpart. This may be because present CI speech coding schemes are largely based on English. This study aims to evaluate the relative contributions of temporal envelope (E) cues to Mandarin phoneme (including vowel, and consonant) and lexical tone recognition to provide information for speech coding schemes specific to Mandarin. Design: Eleven normal hearing subjects were studied using acoustic temporal E cues that were extracted from 30 continuous frequency bands between 80 and 7,562 Hz using the Hilbert transform and divided into five frequency regions. Percent-correct recognition scores were obtained with acoustic E cues presented in three, four, and five frequency regions and their relative weights calculated using the least-square approach. Results: For stimuli with three, four, and five frequency regions, percent-correct scores for vowel recognition using E cues were 50.43-84.82%, 76.27-95.24%, and 96.58%, respectively; for consonant recognition 35.49-63.77%, 67.75-78.87%, and 87.87%; for lexical tone recognition 60.80-97.15%, 73.16-96.87%, and 96.73%. For frequency region 1 to frequency region 5, the mean weights in vowel recognition were 0.17, 0.31, 0.22, 0.18, and 0.12, respectively; in consonant recognition 0.10, 0.16, 0.18, 0.23, and 0.33; in lexical tone recognition 0.38, 0.18, 0.14, 0.16, and 0.14. Conclusion: Regions that contributed most for vowel recognition was Region 2 (502-1,022 Hz) that contains first formant (F1) information; Region 5 (3,856-7,562 Hz) contributed most to consonant recognition; Region 1 (80-502 Hz) that contains fundamental frequency (F0) information contributed most to lexical tone recognition.
| S-EPMC8678109 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionAlthough the motor signs of Parkinson's disease (PD) are well defined, nonmotor symptoms, including higher-level language deficits, have also been shown to be frequent in patients with PD. In the present study, we used a lexical decision task (LDT) to find out whether access to the mental lexicon is impaired in patients with PD, and whether task performance is affected by bradykinesia.Materials and methodsParticipants were 34 nondemented patients with PD, either without (off) medication (n = 16) or under optimum (on) medication (n = 18). A total of 19 age-matched control volunteers were also recruited. We recorded reaction times (RTs) to the LDT and a simple RT (control) task. In each task, stimuli were either visual or auditory. Statistical analyses consisted of repeated-measures analyses of variance and Tukey's HSD post hoc tests.ResultsIn the LDT, participants with PD both off and on medication exhibited intact access to the mental lexicon in both modalities. In the visual modality, patients off medication were just as fast as controls when identifying real words, but slower when identifying pseudowords. In the visual modality of the control task, RTs for pseudowords were significantly longer for PD patients off medication than for controls, revealing an unexpected but significant lexicality effect in patients that was not observed in the auditory modality. Performances of patients on medication did not differ from those of age-matched controls.DiscussionMotor execution was not slowed in patients with PD either off or on medication, in comparison with controls. Regarding lexical access, patients off medication seemed to (1) have difficulty inhibiting a cognitive-linguistic process (i.e., reading) when it was not required (simple reaction time task), and (2) exhibit a specific pseudoword processing deficit in the LDT, which may have been related to impaired lateral word inhibition within the mental lexicon. These deficits seemed to be compensated by medication.
| S-EPMC8107209 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The impact of clear speech, increased vocal intensity, and rate reduction on acoustic characteristics of vowels was compared in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), speakers with multiple sclerosis (MS), and healthy controls.Speakers read sentences in habitual, clear, loud, and slow conditions. Variations in clarity, intensity, and rate were stimulated using magnitude production. Formant frequency values for peripheral and nonperipheral vowels were obtained at 20%, 50%, and 80% of vowel duration to derive static and dynamic acoustic measures. Intensity and duration measures were obtained.Rate was maximally reduced in the slow condition, and vocal intensity was maximized in the loud condition. The clear condition also yielded a reduced articulatory rate and increased intensity, although less than for the slow or loud conditions. Overall, the clear condition had the most consistent impact on vowel spectral characteristics. Spectral and temporal distinctiveness for peripheral-nonperipheral vowel pairs was largely similar across conditions.Clear speech maximized peripheral and nonperipheral vowel space areas for speakers with PD and MS while also reducing rate and increasing vocal intensity. These results suggest that a speech style focused on increasing articulatory amplitude yields the most robust changes in vowel segmental articulation.
| S-EPMC5572218 | biostudies-other