The Impact of Rate Reduction and Increased Loudness on Fundamental Frequency Characteristics in Dysarthria

Abstract

Objective: This study examined the extent to which articulatory rate reduction and increased loudness were associated with adjustments in utterance-level measures of fundamental frequency (F₀) variability for speakers with dysarthria and healthy controls that have been shown to impact on intelligibility in previously published studies. More generally, the current study sought to compare and contrast how a slower-than-normal rate and increased vocal loudness impact on a variety of utterance-level F₀ characteristics for speakers with dysarthria and healthy controls. Patients and Methods: Eleven speakers with Parkinson’s disease, 15 speakers with multiple sclerosis, and 14 healthy control speakers were audio recorded while reading a passage in habitual, loud, and slow conditions. Magnitude production was used to elicit variations in rate and loudness. Acoustic measures of duration, intensity and F₀ were obtained. Results and Conclusions: For all speaker groups, a slower-than-normal articulatory rate and increased vocal loudness had distinct effects on F₀ relative to the habitual condition, including a tendency for measures of F₀ variation to be greater in the loud condition and reduced in the slow condition. These results suggest implications for the treatment of dysarthria.

The Effect of Loud Voice and Clear Speech on the Use of Vocal Fry in Women

“…And the level of increase is consistent with other experiments, although the range of intensity values varies across studies [17,18,61,62]. Similarly, the increase in mean F0 from conversational to loud condition of approximately 37 Hz is consistent with data from healthy speakers in other experiments [62] and the increase was expected, given that F0 tends to rise naturally as intensity is increased [14,17,18]. …”

Construção de um instrumento de triagem de perturbações motoras da fala: Standardização do texto foneticamente equilibrado "O Sol"

“…Estas alterações condicionam a inteligibilidade do discurso e as competências comunicativas (Kempler & Van Lancker, 2002;Tjaden & Wilding, 2011).…”

“…Um grau elevado de fiabilidade aumenta a confiança dos profissionais e investigadores face à utilização de um instrumento (Ferreira & Marques, 1998;Maroco & Garcia-Marques, 2006;SACMOT, 2002;Terwee et al, 2007) É importante dotar os profissionais de saúde de competências e ferramentas que auxiliem na identificação precoce das PMF, pelo impacto que estas têm nas competências sócio comunicativas e qualidade de vida do sujeito. Torna-se emergente a utilização de um instrumento válido, fiável e de aplicação rápida, que analise as características da fala, permitindo a realização de rastreios, a atribuição de um diagnóstico e a elaboração de um plano terapêutico eficaz para cada sujeito (Kempler & Van Lancker, 2002;Tjaden & Wilding, 2011;Villaseñor-Pineda & Montes-yGómez, 2004).…”

The Effect of Rate Reduction on Signaling Prosodic Contrasts in Dysarthria

“…Rate reduction is often used as a means to increase intelligibility in dysarthria (DYS) [1,2,3,4]. Decreasing speaking rate alters articulatory movement [1,5], such that articulatory displacements and vocal tract shapes become more similar to those of healthy speakers [1,6].…”

“…Notable exceptions include an acoustic study in speakers with DYS due to Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis that found reduced F0 variation (e.g. mean, maximum, range) at slow speaking rate [2] and a perceptual study, which showed that listeners had more difficulty classifying the prosodic intent of speakers with cerebral palsy at slow rate [18]. …”