A new, intensity-based method of measuring syllable duration was used to assess syllabic timing in 75 patients with dysarthria of predominantly traumatic and cerebro-vascular origin and in 30 normal subjects. The applied speech tasks included repetitions of sentences containing chains of plosive-vowel-syllables. The logarithm of the duration of the syllable carrying sentence accent proved to be particularly highly correlated with perceived speech rate. Among the potential sources of temporal variability, segmental influences and the influence of sentence stress were examined. Further, the between-sentence variation of syllable duration was assessed. The resulting measures of variability were correlated with the severity of dysarthric impairment. A strengthening of normal effects was found in the consonant-related variation, whereas intrinsic vowel effects and the influence of sentence stress were largely reduced. These results are discussed from the viewpoint of timing theories in speech and limb motor control. They are considered to provide a valuable background against which the speech impairments of specific neurologic groups can be tested.

This work explores methods of parameterizing parallel palatographic and acoustic descriptions of the fricatives is/ and /J/. The immediate aim of the parameterization was to facilitate elucidation of the relationships between the two sets of data. The longer-term, clinically-oriented aim was to determine the feasibility of using this approach to converge on acoustic parameters sensitive to systematic articulatory variation.The ways in which the values of the different palatographic and acoustic parameters reflect the influence of the experimental variables (speaker, fricative phoneme, vocalic context and position in word) are compared and discussed. Generally, the two sets of parameters appeared comparable in sensitivity. In addition, the attempt was made to predict values of the acoustic parameters from the measured values of the EPG parameters. The prediction was also successful enough to warrant applying the approach in future to more extensive material.

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Continuous recording of upper airway pressure and airflow can identify the sites of obstructive events during sleep, and their relative distribution along the upper airway segments. A separation of transpalatal and subpalatal obstructive events has been used. The purpose of the present study was to investigate if uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (UPPP) had reduced transpalatal more than subpalatal obstructive events 18 months postoperatively, and to investigate any influence of age and obesity. Fourteen consecutive male patients were investigated by overnight recording of upper airway pressure and airflow before, and 18 months after, UPPP. The localization of obstructive events pre- and postoperatively revealed that the proportion of obstructive events located transpalatally were reduced from 65.1 to 30.5% of all (P < 0.05). Viewing the two sites separately, the reduction in number of transpalatal events (81%) was higher than the reduction in subpalatal events (42%) (P < 0.05). Age + Body Mass Index (BMI) correlated inversely with relative reduction in subpalatal events but did not correlate to any change in transpalatal events. Treatment response with regards to reduction in recorded Apnoea Hypopnoea Index (AHI) was achieved in 9 out of the 11 patients who had mainly transpalatal obstructive events preoperatively.