The effect of multitalker background noise on speech intelligibility in Parkinson\u27s disease and controls

This study investigated the effect of multi-talker background noise on speech intelligibility in participants with hypophonia due to Parkinson’s disease (PD). Ten individuals with PD and 10 geriatric controls were tested on four speech intelligibility tasks at the single word, sentence, and conversation level in various conditions of background noise. Listeners assessed speech intelligibility using word identification or orthographic transcription procedures. Results revealed non-significant differences between groups when intelligibility was assessed in no background noise. PD speech intelligibility decreased significantly relative to controls in the presence of background noise. A phonetic error analysis revealed a distinct error profile for PD speech in background noise. The four most frequent phonetic errors were glottal-null, consonant-null in final position, stop place of articulation, and initial position cluster-singleton. The results demonstrate that individuals with PD have significant and distinctive deficits in speech intelligibility and phonetic errors in the presence of background noise

Exploration of experiences in therapeutic groups for patients with severe mental illness: development of the Ferrara group experiences scale (FE-GES)

The study has been supported by the University of Ferrara (University Funds for Scientific Research 2008–2009

Effects of Multi-talker Noise on the Acoustics of Voiceless Stop Consonants in Parkinson\u27s Disease

This study examined the effect of increased speech intensity on stop consonant acoustics in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Acoustic analyses focused on measures of spirantization, voicing during closure, stop closure durations, and voice onset time. Ten individuals with Parkinson’s disease and ten age-matched controls were audio recorded while they read aloud words from the Distinctive Features Differences Test (DFD) during two conditions: no noise and 65 dB of multi-talker background noise. When compared to controls, the participants with PD had values that approached a significant difference for the measures related to greater percent voicing into closure (p=0.074), lower mean syllable intensity (p=0.069) and greater spirantization ratio (p=0.094). When compared to the no noise condition, the 65 dB multi-talker noise condition was associated with significant changes in voice onset time (VOT), syllable intensity, spirantization ratio and other measures. In addition, the place of stop consonant production had a significant effect on measures of closure duration, VOT, spectral skewness and other measures. These preliminary findings suggest that additional studies of the effect of changes in speech intensity on stop production in PD are warranted. The results of the present study identified several acoustic measures of stop production that may be useful in future evaluations of treatment outcome in PD