Objective: To evaluate the effects of language, disease duration, and medication on acoustic and prosodic parameters in the speech of Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients.

Background: Voice and speech are often impaired in PD, contributing to alteration of intelligibility and daily communication abilities. It is unclear how these impairments depend on language-specific properties such as prosody. Moreover, less is known about how speech impairments evolve along the progression of the disease or about their consistency in response to medical treatment.

Methods: A subset of 59 PD patients (out of an expected total of 120) were recruited in two countries (29 in France and 30 in Portugal) and divided into 3 groups according to disease duration (A: < 4years; B: 4-10 years; C: > 10 years). Evaluations were performed off and on medical treatment. Patients were age-matched with 59 healthy controls. Several speech tasks were recorded, ranging from maximum phonation time (MPT), vowel /a/ production (for acoustic analysis), and sentence reading (for prosodic analysis). Effects of medication and disease duration on various speech parameters (e.g., F0, energy, HNR, jitter, shimmer) were examined independently for both languages (French and Portuguese) and compared cross-linguistically.

Results: Both French and Portuguese patients showed lower MPT compared to controls, with no effects of medication along disease duration. Regarding F0, both French and Portuguese male patients on medication showed increased F0 compared to controls, independent of disease duration. In contrast, French and Portuguese female patients showed no difference to controls, but decreasing F0 along disease duration. No other acoustical measures showed significant differences between patients and controls. As expected, prosodic measures in French and Portuguese showed flattened speech in patients compared to controls. Cross-linguistic analyses of sentence productions are still underway.

Conclusions: Preliminary results on the recruited subset of patients compared to controls indicate that MPT and F0 show similar changes across French and Portuguese. Medication effects seem to be less influential for voice impairments than gender differences and disease duration. Despite the strong variability in our data, we expect these results to be confirmed in the total set of 120 patients.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/preliminary-results-of-a-cross-linguistic-comparison-on-dysarthria-in-parkinsons-disease/