Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) usually reveal speech disorders and, among other symptoms, the alteration of speech rhythm. The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to test the validity of two acoustic parameters—%V, vowel percentage and VtoV, the mean interval between two consecutive vowel onset points—for the identification of rhythm variation in early-stage PD speech and (2) to analyze the effect of PD on speech rhythm in two different speaking tasks: reading passage and monolog. A group of 20 patients with early-stage PD was involved in this study and compared with 20 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HCs). The results of the acoustic analysis confirmed that %V is a useful cue for early-stage PD speech characterization, having significantly higher values in the production of patients with PD than the values in HC speech. A simple speaking task, such as the reading task, was found to be more effective than spontaneous speech in the detection of rhythmic variations.

Parkinson's Disease dysarthria affects the speech motor control, causing alterations at the suprasegmental level of speech. In previous researches, vowel percentage (%V) and the mean interval between two consecutive vowel onset points (VtoV) were effectively used in the synchronic description of the rhythmic variations of Italian PD speech, compared to healthy speech, even at a very early stage of the disease.This study aims at verifying the early alteration of PD speech rhythm using a diachronic approach. To reach this goal, a corpus of read speech produced by a single PD subject (female, 66 years old) has been collected, consisting of 15 radiophonic speech samples (about 100 s each) on the same topic, recorded between 2001 and 2021.The speech samples were manually segmented in consonantal and vocalic intervals by means of Praat, allowing the calculation of %V and VtoV.The results show an alteration of %V values since 2018, two years before the diagnosis and the insurgence of motor symptoms.Moreover, first results of the application of the automatic segmentation performed by SPPAS on a selection of PD speech samples will also be presented.

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The present study is intended to compare two approaches of labeling expressive corpora: auto-annotation and annotation by external lay listeners. These two methods have been applied to the semi-spontaneous emotional speech produced by Chinese learners of L2 Italian, involved in the CardTask, a moodinduction procedure that allows us to control the context of interaction, preserving the spontaneity of reactions.The emotional responses to the stimuli presented in the task were the object of an auto-annotation session. The same samples were then administered only in the auditory mode to 20 Italian and 20 Chinese lay listeners. The results of perceptual tests have underlined some similarities and differences between both auto-and external annotation, and between the ratings given by external Italian and Chinese listeners. The labels chosen by native Italians were similar to those selected in the auto-annotation session, particularly in the case of anxiety, fear and disgust. The correspondence between the results of the two annotation methods may be ascribed to the different prosodic patterns characterizing the emotional states. The results of the annotation made by Chinese listeners show that they found it hard to give a specific emotional label to utterances produced in a second language relying solely on prosodic patterns.

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