Objective: Several issues concerning F2 slope in dysarthria were addressed by obtaining speech acoustic measures and judgments of intelligibility for sentences produced in Habitual, Clear and Loud conditions by speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) and healthy controls. Patients and Methods: Acoustic measures of average and maximum F2 slope for diphthongs, duration and intensity were obtained. Listeners judged intelligibility using a visual analog scale. Differences in measures among groups and conditions as well as relationships among measures were examined. Results: Average and maximum F2 slope metrics were strongly correlated, but only average F2 slope consistently differed among groups and conditions, with shallower slopes for the PD group and steeper slopes for Clear speech versus Habitual and Loud. Clear and Loud speech were also characterized by lengthened durations, increased intensity and improved intelligibility versus Habitual. F2 slope and intensity were unrelated, and F2 slope was a significant predictor of intelligibility. Conclusion: Average diphthong F2 slope was more sensitive than maximum F2 slope to articulatory mechanism involvement in mild dysarthria in PD. F2 slope holds promise as an objective measure of treatment-related changes in the articulatory mechanism for therapeutic techniques that focus on articulation.

Background: While physicians are key to primary preventive care, their delivery rate is suboptimal. Assessment of physician beliefs is integral to understanding current behavior and the conceptualization of strategies to increase delivery.

The study and development of software able to show the effect of aging of faces is one of the tasks of face recognition technologies. Some software solutions are used for investigations, some others to show the effects of drugs on healthy appearance, however some other applications can be proposed for the analysis of visual arts. Here we use a freely available software, which is providing interesting results, for the comparison of ancient marble busts. An analysis of Augustus busts is proposed.Face recognition software and technologies are focusing on the possibility of computer algorithms to recognize a face in some galleries of images, which can be acquired from pictures provided by still images or frames of a video sequence. The software algorithms then must reproduce the innate human ability to recognize a face, a fundamental task in mimic the behavior of the human brain. Another important research in the field of face recognition is the study of the effects of aging in the craniofacial morphology [1]. Human faces change during the life, their features varying affected by several factors ranging from the inherent genetics and the environmental constrains.As told in Ref.2, several agencies of investigation regularly require matching a probe image with the individuals in the missing person database. However, there are often significant differences between facial features of probe and gallery images due to age variation. For instance if the probe image is a 15 years-old boy or girl and the gallery image of the same person is of 5 years, the face recognition algorithm must perform a very difficult task.Researchers have then proposed several age simulation and modeling techniques [2]. These models alter the face according to the facial growth over a specific period of time. The reader can find several references given in [2], the oldest is that of Burt and Perrett [3]. Since the face aging is affecting the performance of face recognition systems, the analysis of synthetically generating age-progressed or age-regressed images is a good method of improving the robustness of face-based biometrics [1]. In Ref.4, the accuracy of methods for the security of biometric verification systems is investigated. The paper presents methods of modeling and predicting facial template aging based on matching score analysis. An interesting social application of a software solution for aging faces was proposed by the Task Force for Tobacco-Free Women and Girls in New York State, which utilized it to illustrate how smoking can affect the facial appearance [5]. The task force members reviewed the literature on the association between smoking and facial wrinkling, provided parameters for customization of the APRIL (age progression image launcher) [6]. Photoshop is also used for ageing the faces, using its FaceAge® plugin. However, this is not freely available. Some software solutions are then used for investigation, some others to show the effects of drugs on healthy appearance, however other applications can be imagined and used, for i...

Objective: This study examined the effect of intensity level of presentation on scaling of speech intelligibility in speakers with and without dysarthria. Patients and Methods: A total of 50 utterances produced by speakers with dysarthria and healthy speakers were played to 60 listeners in four conditions, which consisted of two different presentation levels (‘high’ vs. ‘low’) and equalization of levels across utterances (‘adjusted’ vs. ‘unadjusted’). Speech intelligibility was scaled by using a direct magnitude estimation technique with and without modulus. Results: A significant decrease in speech intelligibility was indicated when the stimuli were adjusted to have fixed intensity on the most intense vocalic nuclei of each word, while no significant change was found between ‘high’ and ‘low’ presentation level conditions. Conclusion: The findings suggest that an increase in presentation level alone does not result in significant improvement in speech intelligibility ratings. The results are discussed by considering clinical implications in conducting speech therapy with emphasis on intensity variation.

BackgroundA practice intervention must have its basis in an understanding of the physician and practice to secure its benefit and relevancy. We used a formative process to characterize primary care physician attitudes, needs, and practice obstacles regarding primary prevention. The characterization will provide the conceptual framework for the development of a practice tool to facilitate routine delivery of primary preventive care.MethodsA focus group of primary care physician Opinion Leaders was audio-taped, transcribed, and qualitatively analyzed to identify emergent themes that described physicians' perceptions of prevention in daily practice.ResultsThe conceptual worth of primary prevention, including behavioral counseling, was high, but its practice was significantly countered by the predominant clinical emphasis on and rewards for secondary care. In addition, lack of health behavior training, perceived low self-efficacy, and patient resistance to change were key deterrents to primary prevention delivery. Also, the preventive focus in primary care is not on cancer, but on predominant chronic nonmalignant conditions.ConclusionsThe success of the future practice tool will be largely dependent on its ability to "fit" primary prevention into the clinical culture of diagnoses and treatment sustained by physicians, patients, and payers. The tool's message output must be formatted to facilitate physician delivery of patient-tailored behavioral counseling in an accurate, confident, and efficacious manner. Also, the tool's health behavior messages should be behavior-specific, not disease-specific, to draw on shared risk behaviors of numerous diseases and increase the likelihood of perceived salience and utility of the tool in primary care.

Purpose Acoustic variation in a passage read by speakers with dysarthria and healthy speakers was examined. Method 15 speakers with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), 12 speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD), and 14 healthy speakers were studied. Acoustic variables included measures of global speech timing (e.g., articulation rate, pause characteristics), vocal intensity (e.g., mean sound pressure level and intensity modulation), and segmental articulation (i.e., utterance-level second formant interquartile range (F2 IQR)). Acoustic measures were obtained from three segments operationally defined to represent the beginning, middle, and end of a reading passage. Two speaking conditions associated with common treatment techniques for dysarthria were included for comparison to a habitual speaking condition. These conditions included a slower-than-habitual rate (Slow) and greater-than-habitual intensity (Loud). Results There was some degree of acoustic variation across the three operationally-defined segments of the reading passage. The Slow, Loud and Habitual conditions yielded comparable characteristics of variation. Patterns of acoustic variation across the three passage segments also were largely similar across speaker groups. Conclusions Within-task acoustic variation during passage reading should be considered when making decisions regarding speech sampling in clinical practice and research. The contributions of speech disorder severity and linguistic variables to within-task acoustic change warrant further investigation. Learning outcomes Readers will be able to (1) discuss the motivation for studying and understanding within-task variation in contextual speech, (2) describe patterns of acoustic variation for speakers with dysarthria and healthy speakers during passage reading, (3) discuss the relationship between non-habitual speaking conditions and within-task variation, (4) understand the need to consider within-speaker, within-task variation in speech sampling.

Clearly produced vowels exhibit longer duration and more extreme spectral properties than plain, conversational vowels. These features also characterize tense relative to lax vowels. This study explored the interaction of clear-speech and tensity effects by comparing clear and plain productions of three English tense-lax vowel pairs (/i-I/, /A-ˆ/, /u-U/ in /kVd/ words). Both temporal and spectral acoustic features were examined, including vowel duration, vowel-to-word duration ratio, formant frequency, and dynamic spectral characteristics. Results revealed that the tenseÀlax vowel difference was generally enhanced in clear relative to plain speech, but clear-speech modifications for tense and lax vowels showed a trade-off in the use of temporal and spectral cues. While plain-to-clear vowel lengthening was greater for tense than lax vowels, clear-speech modifications in spectral change were larger for lax than tense vowels. Moreover, peripheral tense vowels showed more consistent clear-speech modifications in the temporal than spectral domain. Presumably, artic-ulatory constraints limit the spectral variation of these extreme vowels, so clear-speech modifications resort to temporal features and reserve the primary spectral features for tensity contrasts. These findings suggest that clear-speech and tensity interactions involve compensatory modifications in different acoustic domains.

Purpose: Few studies have reported on the vowel space area (VSA) in both acoustic and kinematic domains. This study examined acoustic and kinematic VSAs for speakers with and without dysarthria and evaluated effects of normalization on acoustic and kinematic VSAs and the relationship between these measures. Method: Vowel data from 12 speakers with and without dysarthria, presenting with a range of speech abilities, were examined. The speakers included four speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), four speakers with brain injury (BI), and four neurotypical (NT) speakers. Speech acoustic and kinematic data were acquired simultaneously using electromagnetic articulography during a passage reading task. Raw and normalized VSAs calculated from corner vowels /i/, /æ/, /ɑ/, and /u/ were evaluated. Normalization was achieved through z score transformations to the acoustic and kinematic data. The effect of normalization on variability within and across groups was evaluated. Regression analysis was used across speakers to assess the association between acoustic and kinematic VSAs for both raw and normalized data. Results: When evaluating the speakers as three different groups (i.e., PD, BI, and NT), normalization reduced the standard deviations within each group and changed the relative differences in average magnitude between groups. Regression analysis revealed a significant relationship between normalized, but not raw, acoustic and kinematic VSAs, after the exclusion of an outlier speaker. Conclusions: Normalization reduces the variability across speakers, within groups, and changes average magnitudes affecting speaker group comparisons. Normalization also influences the correlation between acoustic and kinematic measures. Further investigation of the impact of normalization techniques upon acoustic and kinematic measures is warranted. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22669747