Acoustic Characteristics of Fricatives /s/ and /∫/ Produced by Speakers with Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

PurposeThis study investigated acoustic characteristics of fricatives produced in a repeated syllables task by speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD), focusing on temporal, intensity, and spectral moment analyses.MethodsTen participants with PD and nine neurologically-healthy participants were asked to repeat the two words, sigh and shy, ten times in a row and at a comfortable rate. Acoustic measurements were made for duration and intensity of each fricative and vowel, plus four coefficients of spectral moments for the fricatives.ResultsResults indicated a varying effect of duration difference between group, with marginally shorter duration of fricatives but much shorter duration of vowels in speakers with PD, as compared to controls; comparable vowel-fricative intensity differences for the two groups; and for the group with PD relatively intact coarticulation throughout fricative.ConclusionsThe findings suggest considering the complex effect of overall speech rate on different kinds of segments in PD. The findings also have implications for speech stimuli in research on coarticulation.

Acoustic analysis of fricatives in dysarthric speakers with cerebral palsy

“…A more recent study on fricatives also focused on sibilants /s, ʃ/ such as Kim (2017) which found that the duration and intensity of fricatives from dysarthric speakers with Parkinson's disease are significantly different than healthy speakers. More varied results were found in spectral moment measurements.…”

Speech Impairment in Parkinson’s Disease: Acoustic Analysis of Unvoiced Consonants in Italian Native Speakers

“…Interest has been recently devoted to the articulation approach and the acoustic characterization of different phonemes. In this context, [19] investigated the properties of fricatives produced by PDPs, as these consonants are commonly mispronounced in dysarthric patients [20]. The authors analyzed a corpus including 10 PDPs and 9 HCs repeating two English words (sigh and shy) ten times.…”

“…As for the spectral moments, they have been employed in several studies for the characterization of dysarthric speech [19], [20]. We employed four spectral moments: mean spectral peak, which measures whether most energy is concentrated in a small band or dispersed over a wider range; spectral standard deviation, which is a measure of deviation of the spectrum frequencies from the centre of gravity; spectral skewness, which measures the shape of the spectrum below the mean peak compared to the frequencies above it; spectral kurtosis, which describes the weakness of the energy distribution, with positive and negative values suggesting well defined spectral peaks and a flat distribution [20].…”

“…the unvoiced consonant) and the subsequent voiced area. According to [19], the intensity difference between average values of the unvoiced consonant and the following vocal nucleus can reflect the reduced phonetic contrast, often described as blurred speech. As for duration ratio, it measures the ratio between the lengths of the unvoiced consonant and the adjacent voiced tract to quantify the reduced unvoiced consonant duration, which usually characterizes PDPs.…”

Distortion of Voiced Obstruents for Differential Diagnosis Between Parkinson’s Disease and Multiple System Atrophy

“…Consonants distortion across various diseases have been typically assessed using perceptual evaluation [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. During the last 2 decades, a considerable effort has been produced to develop objective measures that assess consonant distortions in PD [15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. In these studies, voice onset time (VOT) has been the most analyzed feature but with rather contradictory outcomes [23,24,17,20].…”