Entraining with another person’s speech rhythm: Evidence from healthy speakers and individuals with Parkinson’s disease

Abstract

This study examines entrainment of speech timing and rhythm with a model speaker in healthy persons and individuals with Parkinson's. We asked whether participants coordinate their speech initiation and rhythm with the model speaker, and whether the regularity of metrical structure of sentences influences this behaviour. Ten native German speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria following Parkinson's and 10 healthy controls heard a sentence ('prime') and subsequently read aloud another sentence ('target'). Speech material comprised 32 metrically regular and irregular sentences, respectively. Turn-taking delays and alignment of speech rhythm were measured using speech wave analyses. Results showed that healthy participants initiated speech more closely in rhythm with the model speaker than patients. Metrically regular prime sentences induced anticipatory responses relative to metrically irregular primes. Entrainment of speech rhythm was greater in metrically regular targets, especially in individuals with Parkinson's. We conclude that individuals with Parkinson's may exploit metrically regular cues in speech.

Sensorimotor Response to Tongue Displacement Imagery by Talkers with Parkinson’s Disease

“…The current findings that the SPEAK OUT! group showed entrainment effects may relate to recent reports that individuals with PD are able to use metrical (temporal) auditory speech cues to entrain to speech [22]. Together, the data suggest possible strategies using entrainment in the auditory and visual channels as a possible means of addressing the speech difficulties of individuals with PD.…”

Rhythmic performance in hypokinetic dysarthria: Relationship between reading, spontaneous speech and diadochokinetic tasks

“…These disturbances have been described for syllable repetitions ( Skodda, Flasskamp et al, 2010 ; Skodda, Grönheit, & Schlegel, 2010 ), and connected speech ( Liss et al, 2009 ). In addition, Späth et al (2016) report that PwPD were less able to copy a rhythmical model during an entrainment task than healthy controls, and Grahn and Brett (2009) found that this speaker group was less able to process rhythmic tone sequences.…”

Syllable as a unit of information transfer in linguistic communication: The entropy syllable parsing model

“…In Parkinson's disease the ability to initiate speech (measured via turn-taking delay) and alignment of speech rhythm with stimuli is also disrupted. However, individuals with Parkinson's appear to perform better when metric rhythm is available from the stimuli, exploiting regular cues in speech (Späth et al, 2016). This underscores the role of the syllable-level envelope in temporal organization of both speech production and perception mechanisms.…”