75. Automatic detection of dysprosody patterns in patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease

Abstract

Dysprosody is characterized by alterations of rhythm and speed of speech and represents one of the most frequent alteration of speech in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Our aim was to identify the presence of rhythmic alterations in the parameters related to speech rate in PD patients with no or mild hypophonia during a sentence repetition task. Twenty PD patients (6 women) and 19 healthy controls (10 women) were tested. The task consisted in the repetition of a standardized Italian vocalic sentence (“Il bambino ama le aiuole della mamma”) at least 10 times at comfortable loudness. Audio analysis is based on a newly developed automatic voiced-unvoiced segmentation to calculate net speech rate and the percentage of voiced segments with respect to the sentence duration. The analysis showed that in PD patients the speech is characterized by short rushes followed by inappropriate pauses, as revealed by the reduction of the sentence duration and the increase in net speech rate. PD patients tend to repeat the same sentence in a shorter time period than controls, but with a longer recovery time. Current data suggest that rhythmic alterations of speech may be detectable in patients using a sentence repetition task.