“…A study conducted by (Weismer, 1984 ) suggested, for example, that the degree of articulatory alteration may vary between simple and complex tasks produced by patients with PD, due to the fact that simple speaking tasks (e.g., sentence repetition or reading passage) do not require the full attention of speakers and are more automatic than structured and complex tasks, such as spontaneous monologs. Nevertheless, minimal effort has been given to explore the severity of articulatory or prosodic variation in PD speech under various speaking tasks (Rusz et al, 2013 ; Juste and Andrade, 2017 ; Lowit et al, 2018 ). In particular, to the knowledge of authors, there are no studies focused on this specific topic conducted on Italian PD speech.…”