Prosodic Characteristics of Mandarin Declarative and Interrogative Utterances in Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

This work investigated the prosodic characteristics of declarative and interrogative utterances produced by speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), in comparison to healthy controls (HC). Forty native speakers of Mandarin, including 20 PDs and 20 age-matched HCs, recorded 32 utterances varying in sentence type, sentence length, and sentence-final tone. SS-ANOVA was used to show the F0 contours and the global and final-syllable F0 level, F0 slope, speech rate, and intensity ratio were statistically analyzed using linear mixedeffects models. For the HC group, interrogative utterances showed a significantly higher mean F0 than declarative utterances. The PD group exhibited no significant F0 difference between declarative and interrogative utterances, coinciding with our subjective impression on PD's monotonous voice of tone. This suggests that PD's ability to control fundamental frequency degraded in comparison to HC. Also, the PD group produced significantly faster speech, especially final syllable, than the HC group, suggesting that PD's articulatory control degraded at the end of an utterance.

Parkinsonian Chinese Speech Analysis towards Automatic Classification of Parkinson's Disease

“…However, publicly available speech datasets and classification studies of patients with PD in Chinese are not found. Some people discussed the intonation contrast of PD patients speaking Mandarin Chinese (Liu et al, 2019) and Cantonese (Ma et al, 2010), without further attempts on classification.…”

The Dysarthric Expressed Emotional Database (DEED): An audio-visual database in British English

“…Despite having speech which is less intelligible, many studies show that even with the limited phonological and prosodic dimensions, many people with dysarthria have enough control to signal prosodic contrast on different tasks. For example, several studies investigated the ability of people with dysarthria caused by either cerebral palsy (CP) or PD to signal question-statement contrast in different languages [19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Other studies investigated the prosodic and acoustic characteristics such as the fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and speech rate of speakers with dysarthria in comparison to typical speakers [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

Recognising Emotions in Dysarthric Speech Using Typical Speech Data

“…All 8 speakers were able to control duration while their ability to control pitch varies. Likewise, using prosodic characteristics, the signalling of question-statement contrast in Mandarin, German, and Cantonese languages of people with hypokinetic dysarthria caused by PD was investigated and compared to healthy control speakers [13,14,15]. Although speakers with dysarthria can differ from control speakers in their prosodic characteristics, they were able to signal question-statement contrast like healthy control speakers except for the Mandarin speakers.…”