Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 May:2022:120-124.
doi: 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-25.

Prosodic characteristics of prepausal words produced by patients with neurodegenerative disease

Sunghye Cho  1 , Galit Agmon  2 , Sanjana Shellikeri  2 , Katheryn A Q Cousins  2 , Sharon Ash  2 , David J Irwin  2 , Meredith Spindler  3 , Andres F Deik  3 , Lauren B Elman  3 , Colin Quinn  3 , Mark Liberman  1 , Murray Grossman  2 , Naomi Nevler  2
Affiliations

Prosodic characteristics of prepausal words produced by patients with neurodegenerative disease

Sunghye Cho et al. Speech Prosody. 2022 May.

Abstract

Prosody of patients with neurodegenerative disease is often impaired. We investigated changes to two prosodic cues in patients: the pitch contour and the duration of prepausal words. We analyzed recordings of picture descriptions produced by patients with neurodegenerative conditions that included either cognitive (n=223), motor (n=68), or mixed cognitive and motor impairments (n=109), and by healthy controls (n=28; HC). A speech activity detector identified pauses. Words were aligned to the acoustic signal; pitch values were normalized in scale and duration. Analyses of pitch showed that the ending (90th-100th percentile) of prepausal words had a lower pitch in the mixed and motor groups than the cognitive group and HC. The pitch contour from the midpoint of words to the end showed a steep rising slope for HC, but patients showed a gentle rising or flat slope. This suggests that HC signaled the continuation of their description after the pause with rising contour; patients either failed to keep describing the picture due to cognitive impairment or could not raise pitch due to motor impairments. Prepausal words showed longer duration relative to non-prepausal words with no significant differences between the groups. This suggests that prepausal lengthening is preserved in patients.

Keywords: Prepausal lengthening; clinical speech; cognitive impairment; final pitch contour; motor impairment; neurodegeneration.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Density plot of pause groups in different length.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
Duration-normalized pitch contour of prepausal words by group.
Figure 3:
Figure 3:
Prepausal word duration compared to non-prepausal word duration by group. Panel A shows the raw duration in seconds, where the numbers in lines on the plot indicate pause group length and the x-axis shows the word order in pause groups. Pause groups with more than 12 words were omitted due to few data points. Panel B shows the P/NP ratio by group.
Figure 4:
Figure 4:
Mean duration of prepausal (“P”) and non-prepausal words (“N”) by participants ‘ age.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Yuan J, Liberman M, and Cieri C, “Towards an integrated understanding of speech rate in conversation,” In Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2006.
    1. Pierrehumbert J, “The phonology and phonetics of English intonation,” PhD thesis, MIT, 1980.
    1. Oller DK, “The effect of position in utterance on speech segment duration in English,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 54, pp. 1235–1247, 1973. - PubMed
    1. Byrd D and Saltzman E, “Intragestural dynamics of multiple phrasal boundaries”, Journal of Phonetics, vol. 26, pp. 173–199, 1998.
    1. Shriberg E, Stolcke A, Hakkani-Tür D, and Tür G, “Prosody-based automatic segmentation of speech into sentences and topics,” Speech Communication, vol. 32, no. 1-2, pp. 127–154, Sep. 2000.

LinkOut - more resources