ObjectivesResearch suggests that people with Parkinson's disease (PwPD) do not only suffer from motor but also non-motor impairment. This interdisciplinary study investigated how prominence marking is influenced by problems on the motoric and cognitive level. Materials and methodsWe collected speech production data from 38 native German speakers: 19 PwPD (under medication) with a mild to moderate motor impairment, 13 males and 6 females (mean 66.2 years old, SD = 7.7), and 19 healthy age-and gender-matched control participants (mean 65.4 years old, SD = 9.3). Target words were produced in an accented and unaccented condition within a speech production task. The data were analyzed for intensity, syllable duration, F0 and vowel production. Furthermore, we assessed motor impairment and cognitive functions, i.e. working memory, task-switching, attention control and speed of information processing.

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This study investigated syllable coordination patterns in Essential Tremor (ET) patients treated with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) by using electromagnetic articulography. We analyzed articulatory timing patterns for nine ET patients with activated and inactivated DBS and compared them to a group of healthy age-matched controls. We focused on timing patterns among gestures in syllables with low and high complexity in natural sentence production (simple CV versus complex CCV syllables). These articulatory patterns were interpreted in the framework of a coupled oscillator planning model of speech timing. In simple CV syllables, ET patients did show a similar coordination pattern to healthy control speakers. However, when complexity increased, the patients showed deviant coordination patterns for complex CCV syllables. These deviant patterns even aggravated under activated stimulation. We were able to show that the behavior of the speech system changes when the stimulation was activated, inducing a change in the dynamical system the ET patients have to adapt to. We conclude that coordination problems are not categorical but gradient in nature, pointing to the fact that there are dynamic mechanisms of regulation behind phonetic realization of phonological syllable parses.