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Acoustic Analysis of Mandarin Speech in Parkinson’s Disease with the Effects of Levodopa

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Studies on Speech Production (ISSP 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10733))

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Abstract

This study investigated prosodic and articulatory characteristics of parkinsonian speech by acoustic analysis of the read speech from 21 Mandarin-speaking Parkinson’s Disease (PD) patients before and after administration of levodopa medication, and 21 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HC). PD exhibited reduced F0 variability and increased minimum intensity during the closures of stops than HC. For females, PD also showed smaller vowel space area and vowel articulation index than HC. Administration of levodopa increased the mean, the max, and the range of F0, bringing them closer to those of HC, but little effect was found on other acoustic parameters. Correlation analysis between acoustic parameters and physiological/pathological indices of PD showed that the only significant positive correlation was between pause ratio and UPDRS III score. The findings on acoustic differences between PD and HC can potentially be applied to diagnosis and speech therapy for PD.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Major Program of the National Social Science Fund of China (13&ZD189), National Natural Science Foundation of China (81571348), Jiangsu Natural Science Foundation (SBK2015022028), Jiangsu Provincial Key Research and Development Program (BE2016614) and the project for Jiangsu Higher Institutions’ Excellent Innovative Team for Philosophy and Social Sciences (2017STD006). We also thank the Neurology Department of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University for their helping collect a part of PD’s speech data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210097, China

    Wentao Gu & Ping Fan

  2. Nanjing Brain Hospital Affiliated to Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 210029, China

    Weiguo Liu

Authors
  1. Wentao Gu
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  2. Ping Fan
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  3. Weiguo Liu
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Correspondence to Wentao Gu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

    Qiang Fang

  2. JAIST , Nomi, Japan

    Jianwu Dang

  3. Grenoble Alpes University, Saint-Martin-d'Hères, France

    Pascal Perrier

  4. Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    Jianguo Wei

  5. Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    Longbiao Wang

  6. Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Shenzhen, China

    Nan Yan

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Gu, W., Fan, P., Liu, W. (2018). Acoustic Analysis of Mandarin Speech in Parkinson’s Disease with the Effects of Levodopa. In: Fang, Q., Dang, J., Perrier, P., Wei, J., Wang, L., Yan, N. (eds) Studies on Speech Production. ISSP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10733. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00126-1_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00126-1_19

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