%0 Journal Article
%T Assessment of Prosodic Communicative Efficiency in Parkinson's Disease As Judged by Professional Listeners
%A Heidi Martens
%A Gwen Van Nuffelen
%A Patrick Cras
%A Barbara Pickut
%A Miet De Letter
%A Marc De Bodt
%J Parkinson's Disease
%D 2011
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.4061/2011/129310
%X This study examines the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) on communicative efficiency conveyed through prosody. A new assessment method for evaluating productive prosodic skills in Dutch speaking dysarthric patients was devised and tested on 36 individuals (18 controls, 18 PD patients). Three professional listeners judged the intended meanings in four communicative functions of Dutch prosody: Boundary Marking, Focus, Sentence Typing, and Emotional Prosody. Each function was tested through reading and imitation. Interrater agreement was calculated. Results indicated that healthy speakers, compared to PD patients, performed significantly better on imitation of Boundary Marking, Focus, and Sentence Typing. PD patients with a moderate or severe dysarthria performed significantly worse on imitation of Focus than on reading of Focus. No significant differences were found for Emotional Prosody. Judges agreed well on all tasks except Emotional Prosody. Future research will focus on elaborating the assessment and on developing a therapy programme paralleling the assessment. 1. Introduction Dysarthria is a frequent complication of ParkinsonĄ¯s disease (PD). PD has been reported to affect speech in at least 60% of PD patients, with increased prevalence as the disease progresses [1]. Parkinsonian speech is mainly characterised by the impairment of voice, articulation, and prosody [1, 2]. This multidimensional impairment can have a negative impact on speech intelligibility and hence on communication and on quality of life. Previous research points out that, next to articulation, prosody is the second most important factor contributing to speech intelligibility in dysarthric patients in general [3]. Prosody commonly refers to the suprasegmental speech signal aspects used to convey meaning through variation in fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration [4¨C7]. In dysarthric PD patients specifically, six out of ten most deviant speech dimensions are associated with prosody: monopitch, reduced stress, monoloudness, inappropriate silences, short rushes of speech, and variable rate [1]. Therefore, assessing prosodic skills is important in the diagnosis and remediation of speech disorders in PD. Nevertheless, scientific interest in the phenomenon of prosody within the field of speech-language pathology is rather scarce and slowly evolving, when it comes to characterisation, assessment, and intervention of atypical prosody [8¨C10]. During the last decade, the majority of publications focussing on prosody in PD evaluated prosody in terms of its formal dimensions, such
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/pd/2011/129310/