Prosodic Changes in the Speech of a Single Speaker with Parkinson's Disease

This contribution describes our research into how Parkinson’s Disease (PD) impacts the production and perception of speech. We performed a longitudinal study, making a time series of monthly recordings of the same individual with PD over a year. To determine if the change in prosody would be noticeable both on production and perception levels, we performed acoustic analysis of prosodic features and a perceptual experiment with short phrases taken from the recordings as stimuli. The results of the acoustic analysis showed a decline in f0 variation towards the end of the time period. The results of the perceptual experiment demonstrated that listeners rated the later recordings as less healthy relative to the earlier ones. Listeners’ experience with speech disorders influenced the trend, which was more pronounced for the experienced listeners compared to the listeners with no prior experience with speech disorders.

In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences