Abstract:

Although sentence production is more common than single-word production in daily life, acoustic and intelligibility data from persons with neurogenic speech disorders is largely limited to single-word and target-word utterances. The purpose of the current study is to examine sentence productions of individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and to compare them to data obtained from neurologically normal individuals. Each speaker produced multiple repetitions of a small set of sentences. Acoustic measures included overall sentence durations, segment durations, and vowel formant frequencies. Speech intelligibility of the sentences was measured using scaling techniques. For some subjects, previously obtained acoustic and intelligibility data for single words will be related to the findings for sentences. Results will be discussed descriptively as deviations from patterns observed in normal individuals, and in terms of associations between the acoustic and intelligibility data. [Work supported by NIDCD Award DC00319.]