Assessment of Prosodic Communicative Efficiency in Parkinson's Disease As Judged by Professional Listeners

Abstract

This study examines the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) on communicative efficiency conveyed through prosody. A new assessment method for evaluating productive prosodic skills in Dutch speaking dysarthric patients was devised and tested on 36 individuals (18 controls, 18 PD patients). Three professional listeners judged the intended meanings in four communicative functions of Dutch prosody: Boundary Marking, Focus, Sentence Typing, and Emotional Prosody. Each function was tested through reading and imitation. Interrater agreement was calculated. Results indicated that healthy speakers, compared to PD patients, performed significantly better on imitation of Boundary Marking, Focus, and Sentence Typing. PD patients with a moderate or severe dysarthria performed significantly worse on imitation of Focus than on reading of Focus. No significant differences were found for Emotional Prosody. Judges agreed well on all tasks except Emotional Prosody. Future research will focus on elaborating the assessment and on developing a therapy programme paralleling the assessment.

Recruitment of Language-, Emotion- and Speech-Timing Associated Brain Regions for Expressing Emotional Prosody: Investigation of Functional Neuroanatomy with fMRI

“…Therefore, it has both a specific role in producing emotional prosodic contours, and a more general role in producing prosody without emotion. This finding is intuitive given the generic difficulties experienced by patients with basal ganglia pathology (e.g., Parkinson's disease) in producing prosodic contours (Schröder et al, 2010b ; Martens et al, 2011 ). In relation to the superior temporal gyrus activation observed expressing neutral prosody, the cluster bordered onto the superior temporal sulcus.…”

“…Individual differences in ability have already been shown to influence the brain regions detected in neuroimaging studies of prosodic emotion comprehension (Sander et al, 2003 ; Schirmer et al, 2008 ; Aziz-Zadeh et al, 2010 ; Kreifelts et al, 2010 ; Jacob et al, 2014 ). Based on the association between basal ganglia impairment and a monotone voice with low prosodic expressivity (Martens et al, 2011 ), we also tested whether activity in this region correlates with the ability to transmit appropriate emotional prosody.…”

Charakter zaburzeń mowy w chorobie Parkinsona

“…Oprócz zaburzeñ artykulacyjnych u osób z ChP spotyka siê zaburzenia prozodii emocji, problemy z rozumieniem metafor, nazywaniem i definiowaniem [34][35][36].…”

“…Podsumowuj¹c -g³ówn¹ przyczyn¹ zaburzeñ mowy w ChP jest zmniejszony zakres ruchów narz¹dów artykulacyjnych i wystêpowanie ruchów mimowolnych wyni-kaj¹cych z uszkodzeñ zwojów podstawy. Oprócz tych nieprawid³owooeci pojawiaj¹ siê równie¿ zaburzenia w zakresie g³osu, artykulacji i prozodii oraz zaburzenia pamiêci, co w konsekwencji daje o wiele wiêcej czynników powoduj¹cych nasilenie zaburzeñ mowy [36].…”

Behavioral Measures to Evaluate Prosodic Skills: A Review of Assessment Tools for Children and Adults

“…Following Crystal (2009), we found that there are no published papers that have systematically evaluated and compiled the various tools that are available to assess prosodic skills in children and adults. It is surprising that this lack of literature on assessment tools exists despite the fact that prosodic difficulties extend across a wide range of communication disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD; Green & Tobin, 2009;, specific language impairment (SLI; Marshall, Harcourt-Brown, Ramus, & van der Lely, 2009;Stojanovik, Setter, & Ewijk, 2007), Parkinson's disease (Martens et al, 2011), apraxia (Odell & Shriberg, 2001), aphasia (Danly & Shapiro, 1982), brain injury (Karow, Marquardt, & Marshall, 2001;Moen, 2009;Ross, Edmondson, Seibert, & Homan, 1988), and hearing loss (Nakata, Trehub, & Kanda, 2012;Peng, Tomblin, & Turner, 2008).…”