Purpose: The authors investigated how different variants of clear speech affect segmental and suprasegmental acoustic measures of speech in speakers with Parkinson's disease and a healthy control group.
Method: A total of 14 participants with Parkinson's disease and 14 control participants served as speakers. Each speaker produced 18 different sentences selected from the Sentence Intelligibility Test (Yorkston & Beukelman, 1996). All speakers produced stimuli in 4 speaking conditions (habitual, clear, overenunciate, and hearing impaired). Segmental acoustic measures included vowel space area and first moment (M1) coefficient difference measures for consonant pairs. Second formant slope of diphthongs and measures of vowel and fricative durations were also obtained. Suprasegmental measures included fundamental frequency, sound pressure level, and articulation rate.
Results: For the majority of adjustments, all variants of clear speech instruction differed from the habitual condition. The overenunciate condition elicited the greatest magnitude of change for segmental measures (vowel space area, vowel durations) and the slowest articulation rates. The hearing impaired condition elicited the greatest fricative durations and suprasegmental adjustments (fundamental frequency, sound pressure level).
Conclusions: Findings have implications for a model of speech production for healthy speakers as well as for speakers with dysarthria. Findings also suggest that particular clear speech instructions may target distinct speech subsystems.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2015_JSLHR-S-15-0216 | DOI Listing |
J Acoust Soc Am
January 2025
Department of Apparel and Space Design, Kyoto Women's University, Kyoto, Kyoto 605-8501, Japan.
Ever since de Saussure [Course in General Lingustics (Columbia University Press, 1916)], theorists of language have assumed that the relation between form and meaning of words is arbitrary. However, recently, a body of empirical research has established that language is embodied and contains iconicity. Sound symbolism, an intrinsic link language users perceive between word sound and properties of referents, is a representative example of iconicity in language and has offered profound insights into theories of language pertaining to language processing, language acquisition, and evolution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCureus
December 2024
Neurosurgery, Southmead Hospital, North Bristol NHS, Bristol, GBR.
Cerebral arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) are tangles of abnormal vessels with early arteriovenous (AV) shunting that can lead to intracerebral hemorrhage, seizures, neurologic deficit, or headache. To date, only a few cases of carcinomas metastasizing to pre-existing cerebral AVMs have been reported in the literature. However, renal clear cell carcinoma (RCC) brain metastases that exhibit early AV shunting, where AVM pathology is not present, are extremely rare.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
January 2025
NeMO Lab, ASST GOM Niguarda Cà Granda Hospital, Milan, Italy.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease that can result in a progressive loss of speech due to bulbar dysfunction, which can have significant negative impact on the patient's mental well-being. Alternative Augmentative Communication (AAC) strategies based on synthetic voices have been shown to assist patients in maintaining communication and improving their Quality of Life (QoL). However, such synthetic voices are often perceived as impersonal and fail to capture the unique voice and identity of the patient.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Autism Dev Disord
January 2025
The First Hospital of Jinan University, Guangzhou, China.
Purpose: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show abnormal speech prosody. Tonal languages can pose more difficulties as speakers need to use acoustic cues to make lexical contrasts while encoding the focal function, but the acquisition of speech prosody of non-native languages, especially tonal languages has rarely been investigated.
Methods: This study aims to fill in the aforementioned gap by studying prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin by native Cantonese-speaking children with ASD (n = 25), in comparison with their typically developing (TD) peers (n = 20) and native Mandarin-speaking children (n = 20).
Bioengineering (Basel)
December 2024
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA.
Room reverberation can affect oral/aural communication and is especially critical in computer analysis of voice. High levels of reverberation can distort voice recordings, impacting the accuracy of quantifying voice production quality and vocal health evaluations. This study quantifies the impact of additive simulated reverberation on otherwise clean voice recordings as reflected in voice metrics commonly used for voice quality evaluation.
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