Dysarthria in Traumatic Brain Injury: A Breath Group and Intonational Analysis

Abstract

Prosodic abnormality is a common feature in the dysarthrias associated with traumatic brain injury (TBI), but very few analytic studies have been reported on the nature of the prosodic disturbances. This study, based on analyses of conversational and sentence speech samples, reports on breath group structure and its temporal and intonational components for 12 subjects with TBI and 8 healthy controls. It introduces the method of f₀ close-copy stylization to the study of intonational patterns in dysarthria. The subjects with TBI had reduced mean length and variation of breath groups along with frequent inappropriate locations of breath pause and lengthy and variable breath pauses. Prosodic features that were preserved in the subjects with TBI were phrase final lengthening, f₀ downtrend and a relatively normal f₀ distribution. However, these subjects had reduced speaking and articulation rates, reduced f₀ movement and reduced f₀ slope. The phrase final lengthening and f₀ downtrend phenomena, which can serve as prosodic cues of syntactic boundary, appear to be robust features of speech production, but the dynamic features of f₀ control were more vulnerable to the neurological damage. This study indicates the importance of breath group management in TBI-induced dysarthria and the need to use methods such as those used in this study for large-scale investigations that examine cognitive, linguistic and motoric factors that conspire to reduce communicative efficiency.

Breath Group Analysis for Reading and Spontaneous Speech in Healthy Adults

“…When the pitch tracking algorithm generated errors, the raw f 0 trace was corrected manually using TF32 software [22] , most frequently required to delete erroneous f 0 trace occurring on stop bursts or noise signals and to add a portion of the f 0 trace on which phonation occurred but without f 0 trace, as previously reported [14] . The manually corrected f 0 traces within each breath group sample were used to obtain measures of mean f 0 , max f 0 , and range f 0 (maximum f 0 -minimum f 0 ).…”

“…The breath group has been proposed as a useful functional unit of prosodic analysis, helping to define temporal and f 0 features for connected speech [14] , especially because these features are determined by locations of inspiration. Inspiratory locations usually precede linguistic structural boundaries following grammatical rules; however, inspirations at grammatically inappropriate loci in utterances sometimes occur even for healthy speakers [5,6,[12][13][14] . Bunton [5] reported a 19% occurrence of inappropriate breath locations for normal extemporaneous speech for 3 aged men and 3 aged women.…”

Perfil populacional de pacientes com disartria atendidos em hospital terciário

“…Pesquisas revelam que são muito comuns as anormalidades prosódicas associadas à disartria. Geralmente, esses indivíduos apresentam proporção maior de pausas entre as palavras e no meio das palavras (29)(30) . Além disso, apresentam pausas impróprias frequentes para respiração e inspiração longa e variável (28) .…”

Correlation Between Vowel Centralisation and Incomplete Stop Articulation in Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injury

“…Several acoustic analyses of post-traumatic dysarthria have been reported (e.g. Ziegler and von Cramon 1983;Weismer et al 2001;Wang et al, 2005), but these acoustic methods are rarely used in the investigation of sound simplifications and reductions called "natural phonological processes".…”