Using electromagnetic articulography, the lips, the tip of the tongue, and the tongue dorsum were tracked during repetitions of the syllables [pa], [ta] and [ka] in 10 speakers with dysarthria following severe traumatic brain injury and in 10 age-matched control subjects. When asked to produce the syllable trains as fast as possible, the patient group showed a rather homogeneous pattern of movement abnormalities including prolonged syllable durations and reduced peak velocity/amplitude ratios. Most presumably, limited speed generation gives rise to the impaired ability to increase speech rate. During the habitual speaking condition, reduced velocity/amplitude ratios were restricted to the tongue tip and tongue dorsum. Obviously, the tongue and the lips are differentially affected in dysarthria following severe traumatic brain injury.

We tested the applicability of the Goettinger Hoarseness Diagram (GHD) for quantitative evaluation of voice disorders after severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and compared the obtained data with those from established voice analysis systems such as the Multi-Dimensional Voice Program (MDVP), electroglottography (EGG) and perceptual ratings using sustained vowel productions from 10 patients with TBI dysarthrophonia at late stages postinjury and of 10 healthy control speakers. Statistical analyses revealed significant intergroup differences with respect to various acoustic and perceptual measures, i.e., irregularity component, noise component, noise-to-harmonic ratio, shimmer, jitter, roughness, creakiness, strained-strangledness, hypernasality. By contrast, the considered EGG estimates, i.e., open quotient and speed quotient, did not allow for separation of patients and controls. In addition, the two GHD components exhibited close correlations to perceived roughness and creakiness, on the one hand, and breathiness and, to some degree, nasality, on the other, whereas the MDVP parameters failed to differentiate between these two perceptual modes of phonation.

No abstract

Within current phonological theories the greater tendency of C1 nasals vs. C1 plosives to undergo regressive place assimilation is often treated as the consequence of acoustic-perceptual properties of nasality (e.g. Steriade, 2001). Little is known about the articulatory patterns underlying this asymmetry. Our current EMA study aims to test and compare the effects of manner of articulation of C1 (alveolar nasal vs. alveolar plosive), place of articulation of C2 (labial vs. dorsal plosive), vowel context (palatal /i/ vs. non-palatal vowel /a/), and word frequency upon the intra- and intergestural timing and movement magnitude of various articulators in C1C2 sequences across word-boundaries in German subjects. Our analyses of non-palatal vowel contexts in three speakers showed a greater likelihood of reduction of the tongue tip both in words with a nasal C1 and in high frequency words. For those word pairs in which tongue tip displacement was measurable, tongue tip - tongue back overlap was significantly greater in word pairs with a nasal C1 and in word pairs with high frequency words. On the other hand, tongue tip - lower lip overlap was only significantly greater in word pairs with high frequency words.