Speech Rhythm in Parkinson’s Disease: A Study on Italian

Abstract

Experimental studies on different languages have shown that neurogenetic disorders connected with Parkinson's disease (PD) determine a series of variations in the speech rhythm. This study aims at verifying whether the speech of PD patients presents rhythmic abnormalities compared to healthy speakers also in Italian. The read speech of 15 healthy speakers and of 11 patients with mild PD was segmented in consonantal and vocalic portions. After extracting the durations of all segments, the vowel percentage (%V) and the interval between two consecutive vowel onset points (VtoV) were calculated. The results show that %V has significantly different values in mildly affected patients as compared to controls. For Italian, %V spans between 44% and 50% for healthy subjects and between 51% and 58% for PD subjects. A positive correlation was found between %V and the number of years of PD since its insurgence. The correlation with the age at which the disease insurges is weak. With regard to VtoV, PD subjects do not speak at a significantly slower rate than healthy controls, though a trend in this direction was found. The data suggest that %V could be used as a more reliable parameter for the early diagnosis of PD than speech rate. AbstractExperimental studies on different languages have shown that neurogenetic disorders connected with Parkinson's disease (PD) determine a series of variations in the speech rhythm. This study aims at verifying whether the speech of PD patients presents rhythmic abnormalities compared to healthy speakers also in Italian. The read speech of 15 healthy speakers and of 11 patients with mild PD was segmented in consonantal and vocalic portions. After extracting the durations of all segments, the vowel percentage (%V) and the interval between two consecutive vowel onset points (VtoV) were calculated. The results show that %V has significantly different values in mildly affected patients as compared to controls. For Italian, %V spans between 44% and 50% for healthy subjects and between 51% and 58% for PD subjects. A positive correlation was found between %V and the number of years of PD since its insurgence. The correlation with the age at which the disease insurges is weak. With regard to VtoV, PD subjects do not speak at a significantly slower rate than healthy controls, though a trend in this direction was found. The data suggest that %V could be used as a more reliable parameter for the early diagnosis of PD than speech rate.

Rhythmic Characteristics of Parkinsonian Speech: A Study on Mandarin and Polish

“…These data were confirmed by an experiment conducted on Italian parkinsonian and healthy speech [39]. In that study a corpus of read speech produced by 11 parkinsonian and 15 healthy subjects was collected.…”

Speech Rhythm Variation in Early-Stage Parkinson's Disease: A Study on Different Speaking Tasks

“…As for the first objective, this study confirms that one of the two parameters, %V, changes significantly in the two groups of speakers, being distinctly higher in PD speech than in HC productions, according to the results of previous studies (Liss et al, 2009 ; Pettorino et al, 2016 , 2017 , 2018 ; Lowit et al, 2018 ).…”

“…Research on Italian patients with mild-to-severe PD confirmed the usefulness of %V in association with VtoV, the mean interval between two consecutive vowel onset points (VOPs), for the detection of rhythmic variation in PD read speech, compared with healthy productions (Pettorino et al, 2016 , 2017 ).…”

The Effect of Ageing on Speech Rhythm: A Study on Zurich German

“…Clarifying this point might have a possible implication for the field of speech language pathology. There is evidence, indeed, that dysarthria determines considerable variation in the segmental durational variability between healthy and dysarthric patients [34], [35]. However, in [34], for example, the age range of both control and dysarthric speakers is rather wide.…”