Objective: To investigate the influence of language on acoustic measures of sustained vowels in patients with Parkinson’s disease and healthy volunteers, specifically focusing on jitter, shimmer and GNE (Glottal-to-Noise Excitation ratio).

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) in more than 90% cases is represented with voice impairment known as hypokinetic dysarthria, which manifests as reduced vocal loudness, monotonicity, breathiness, and increased noise in the voice. Acoustic analysis of sustained vowels is the method to objectively assess these vocal changes. Language-specific phonetic and prosodic features, such as vowel articulation, pitch variability, and voice quality, may potentially affect acoustic measures, even in sustained vowel tasks. However, while acoustic measures such as jitter, shimmer, GNE etc. have been extensively studied in PD, the influence of language on these measures remains underexplored.

Method: The study relies on data from Brainphone project (Russia). The speech recordings (sustained /a/ vowel) were sampled at 16 kHz with 32 bits resolution, collected over voice recorder in .wav format. All participants provided written informed consent.

Results: There were 109 unique patients with advanced PD (PwP) (M – 39, F – 79, H&Y stage 3 – 68, stage 4 – 41), 92 – healthy volunteers (HV) (male – 33, female – 59) speaking as a native in Russian (n=102), Tatar (n=12), Russian/Tatar (n=81) or Russian/other language (n=6). Results on noise assessment metrics can be found in the Table 1.

A two-factor analysis showed that there is a significant difference between the groups of PwP and HV in relation to jitter (p=.047), but there is no significant difference between the groups of “Native language” (p=.526) (Fig.1). The same is true for shimmer, where the difference between HV and PwP was statistically significant (p =.001), but no significant difference between the groups of “Native language” (p=.289) (Fig.2). The same is true for GNE, where the difference between HV and PwP was statistically significant (p<.001), but no difference between the groups of “Native language” (p=.275) (Fig.3).

Conclusion: There is no difference in acoustic measures in people speaking Russian, tatar or both as a  native language. Understanding whether acoustic measures are language-independent is crucial for developing universal diagnostic tools and ensuring cross-linguistic validity in voice research.

Figure 1. Jitter

Figure 2. Shimmer

Figure 3. GNE

Table 1. Descriptive statistics

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/language-influence-on-acoustic-measures-of-sustained-vowel-in-patients-with-parkinsons-disease-and-healthy-volunteers/