Deep brain stimulation for severe dystonia associated with Wilson disease: A prospective multicenter meta-analysis of an N-of-1 trial.

Background And Purpose: Disabling dystonia despite optimal medical treatment is common in Wilson disease (WD). No controlled study has evaluated the effect of deep brain stimulation (DBS) on dystonia related to WD. This study was undertaken to evaluate the efficacy of DBS on dystonia related to WD.

Perceptual Classification of Motor Speech Disorders: The Role of Severity, Speech Task, and Listener's Expertise.

Purpose: The clinical diagnosis of motor speech disorders (MSDs) is mainly based on perceptual approaches. However, studies on perceptual classification of MSDs often indicate low classification accuracy. The aim of this study was to determine in a forced-choice dichotomous decision-making task (a) how accuracy of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in perceptually classifying apraxia of speech (AoS) and dysarthria is impacted by speech task, severity of MSD, and listener's expertise and (b) which perceptual features they use to classify.

Contribution of acoustic analysis to the detection of vocoid epenthesis in apraxia of speech and other motor speech disorders.

Background: Vocoid epenthesis within consonant clusters has been claimed to contribute to the diagnosis of apraxia of speech. In clinical practice, the clinicians often doubt about the correct production of clusters as the C-C transition may be minimally disrupted.

Aims: To demonstrate the value of acoustic analysis in clinical practice as a reliable complement to perceptive judgment.

Attention in post-lexical processes of utterance production: Dual-task cost in younger and older adults.

There is a general agreement that speaking requires attention at least for conceptual and lexical processes of utterance production. However, conflicting results have been obtained with dual-task paradigms using either repetition tasks or more generally tasks involving limited loading of lexical selection. This study aimed to investigate whether post-lexical processes recruit attentional resources.

Analysing spectral changes over time to identify articulatory impairments in dysarthria.

Identifying characteristics of articulatory impairment in speech motor disorders is complicated due to the time-consuming nature of kinematic measures. The goal is to explore whether analysing the acoustic signal in terms of total squared changes of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (TSC_MFCC) and its pattern over time provides sufficient spectral information to distinguish mild and moderate dysarthric French speakers with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson's Disease (PD) from each other and from healthy speakers. Participants produced the vowel-glide sequences /ajajaj/, /ujujuj/, and /wiwiwi/.