Objective: This is a pilot study that examines changes in the acoustic characteristics of vowels across speaking tasks for individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). The present study evaluates the task-related acoustic variations as one means of documenting within-speaker adaptation in speech production associated with PD.

Background: As motor events, the production of speech for communication requires the speech mechanism to be adaptive. Varying sound productions based on changing demands of speaking tasks would be one form of adaptation, and this has been reported to be affected in PD. For example, speech in PD may present with a reduced extent of acoustic changes or differences across various speaking tasks when compared to healthy individuals. A decreased ability to make these adjustments can adversely impact communication, such as impaired intelligibility. Importantly, it may also have implications for the consideration of behavioral management approaches for speech impairments.

Methods: This pilot study includes two individuals with PD who were native speakers of American English. The speakers performed speaking tasks including sentence reading, short passage reading, and conversations. These tasks represent a range of communicative demands and can be conceptually organized along a continuum of Hyper- to Hypo-speech (i.e., more formal or exaggerated forms of speaking to less formal or more casual forms of speaking). The speech samples were audio-recorded, and eight American English vowels were analyzed using a computer-based acoustic analysis software. A total of 48 vowel tokens across the sentence and passage reading tasks was analyzed for each individual (i.e., 96 total tokens across reading tasks). In addition, selected vowel tokens produced in conversations were analyzed for comparison with the reading tokens.

Results: Descriptive results for each speaker will be presented and exploratory measures for quantifying these cross-task variations will be evaluated.

Conclusions: Potential clinical and theoretical implications of cross-task variations as adaptations will be discussed.

References: Lindblom, B. (1990). Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H & H theory. Speech production and speech modelling, 403-439.

Mollaei, F., Shiller, D. M., & Gracco, V. L. (2013). Sensorimotor adaptation of speech in Parkinson’s disease. Movement Disorders, 28(12), 1668-1674.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/characterizing-task-based-acoustic-variations-of-vowels-in-parkinsons-disease-preliminary-data/