Intonation Contrast in Cantonese Speakers With Hypokinetic Dysarthria Associated With Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

These data contribute to the researchers' understanding of intonation marking in speakers with PD, with specific application to the production and perception of intonation in a lexical tone language.

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

“…Earlier research on the question-statement contrast [5, 20] showed that listeners are quite able to identify statements produced by PD speakers but have far more trouble in correctly identifying questions. Further analysis is required to see if the same phenomenon applies to the current study.…”

A Cross-Language Study of Acoustic Predictors of Speech Intelligibility in Individuals With Parkinson's Disease

“…Classification of dysarthria was originally developed on the basis of speakers of AE (Darley et al, 1975). Studies of dysarthria in languages other than English are available (e.g., Duez, 2009;Gentil, 1990Gentil, , 1992Jeng et al, 2006;Kobayashi, Fukusako, Anno, & Hirose, 1976;Ma et al, 2010;Nishio & Niimi, 2001;Stokes & Whitehill, 1996;Whitehill & Ciocca, 2000;Whitehill et al, 2003;Ziegler, 2002;Ziegler, Hartmann, & Hoole, 1993) and often use the category labels of the English-based Mayo Clinic classification system to identify the type(s) of dysarthria under study. The phonetic and prosodic (including rhythmic) differences among languages of the world make it likely that the Mayo classification labels may not be universally applicable; surprisingly, this issue has not been addressed in the literature, although some of the reports cited immediately above remark on the possibility of interactions between native language and characteristics of dysarthria.…”

Crosslinguistic Application of English-Centric Rhythm Descriptors in Motor Speech Disorders

“…This package will include an automated version of the vocalic-intervocalic rhythm metrics [7, 82] ; analysis of the modulation of the amplitude envelope in frequency bands across the signal (envelope modulation spectrum) [15], and analysis of the long-term average spectrum. It also will include metrics developed for the telecommunications industry, which have not been applied previously to disordered speech.…”

“…Indeed, Ma et al [7] and Whitehill [8] have published a number of papers that explicitly address language-specific and language-universal effects of various dysarthrias in English versus the tone languages of Mandarin and Cantonese. The dysarthria associated with Parkinson’s disease has been investigated in a range of languages, wherein it has been reported that the symptom of reduced fundamental frequency variation in speech (‘monopitch’) has a language-universal effect on speech prosody, and a language-specific effect for those languages in which fundamental frequency serves a phonological function [7, 9–11]. Chakraborty et al [12, p. 268], who conducted a perceptual analysis of dysarthria in the language of Bengali, acknowledged, ‘… since speech sounds (phonetics) and patterns of stress and intonation in speech (prosody) appear to vary in the context of individual languages, findings from studies on dysarthric speech in other languages cannot be applied to Bengali speech’.…”