Perception of Cantonese Parkinsonian speech

Abstract

The current study is a continuation of our previous case study investigating the effect of reduced pitch range in Parkinsonian speech on a tone language [P. C. M. Wong and R. L. Diehl, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 105, 1246(A) (1999)]. In the first experiment, listeners were asked to identify the last word of semantically neutral sentences produced by Cantonese-speaking Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients, normal speakers, and a resynthesized version of PD speech with expanded pitch range. Identification of normal and PD speech did not differ, perhaps due to the insignificant difference in pitch range between the two types of speech. However, listeners were better at identifying the resynthesized PD speech which contained a larger pitch range than the original PD speech. This latter result supports the theory of context-target pitch distance proposed by Wong and Diehl which states that lexical tone perception relies on a sufficiently large pitch distance between the context and target of an utterance [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 104, 1834(A) (1998)]. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to identify the intended intonation (angry, happy, neutral, and question) of sentences produced by normal and PD speakers. Performance was better for normal speech. [Work supported by NIDCD.]