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European Journal of Disorders of... 1992Speech motor changes in six patients with focal unilateral upper motor neuron (UUMN) lesions were characterised using a variety of techniques including listener... (Comparative Study)
Comparative Study
Speech motor changes in six patients with focal unilateral upper motor neuron (UUMN) lesions were characterised using a variety of techniques including listener judgements, speech acoustic analyses, electromyographic and strength measures. Listener judgements of speech understand-ability, intelligibility and dysarthric features indicated mild dysarthria. Diadochokinesis, electromyographic and strength measures corroborated these observations. The findings of this study delineate the characteristics of the dysarthria associated with unilateral upper motor neuron lesions and have important implications for identifying potential upper motor neuron components of other neurogenic disorders of speech and language.
Topics: Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Brain; Dysarthria; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Motor Neuron Disease; Tomography, X-Ray Computed
PubMed: 1306385
DOI: 10.3109/13682829209029419 -
International Journal of Language &... 2009The psychosocial impact of acquired dysarthria on the speaker is well recognized. To date, speech-and-language therapists have no instrument available to measure this...
BACKGROUND
The psychosocial impact of acquired dysarthria on the speaker is well recognized. To date, speech-and-language therapists have no instrument available to measure this construct. This has implications for outcome measurement and for planning intervention. This paper describes the Dysarthria Impact Profile (DIP), an instrument that has the potential to meet this need in clinical practice.
AIMS
To describe the development of the DIP, which was devised as part of a larger study to measure psychosocial impact of acquired dysarthria from the speaker's perspective.
METHODS & PROCEDURES
The current psychometric properties of the DIP are examined. The scale was administered to 31 participants with acquired dysarthria. The internal consistency of the scale items and their intra-rater reliability were investigated. Concurrent validity was assessed for the portion of the scale (Section A) assessing impact of acquired dysarthria on self-perception, self-concept and self-esteem by comparing the results with changes in self-concept as determined by the Head Injury Semantic Differential Scale (HISD II).
OUTCOMES & RESULTS
The DIP shows good internal consistency and strong intra-rater reliability overall. There was a strong, statistically significant, correlation between results on Section A of the DIP and the results of the HISD II suggesting convergent validity for this portion of the scale. There are some limitations to the scale in its current format and these are highlighted.
CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS
The scale is now ready for further refinement and development. Once validated, it should act as a robust outcome measure for clinicians.
Topics: Adult; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Dysarthria; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Observer Variation; Pilot Projects; Psychometrics; Reproducibility of Results; Self Concept; Speech Intelligibility
PubMed: 18821230
DOI: 10.1080/13682820802317536 -
American Journal of Speech-language... Jan 2022Reading a passage out loud is a commonly used task in the perceptual assessment of dysarthria. The extent to which perceptual characteristics remain unchanged or stable...
OBJECTIVE
Reading a passage out loud is a commonly used task in the perceptual assessment of dysarthria. The extent to which perceptual characteristics remain unchanged or stable over the time course of a passage is largely unknown. This study investigated crowdsourced visual analogue scale (VAS) judgments of intelligibility across a reading passage as a function of cued speaking styles commonly used in treatment to maximize intelligibility.
PATIENTS AND METHOD
The Hunter passage was read aloud in habitual, slow, loud, and clear speaking styles by 16 speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), 30 speakers with multiple sclerosis (MS), and 32 control speakers. VAS judgments of intelligibility from three fragments representing the beginning, middle, and end of the reading passage were obtained from 540 crowdsourced online listeners.
RESULTS
Overall passage intelligibility was reduced for the two clinical groups relative to the control group. All speaker groups exhibited intelligibility variation across the reading passage, with trends of increased intelligibility toward the end of the reading passage. For control speakers and speakers with PD, patterns of intelligibility variation across passage reading did not differ with speaking style. For the MS group, intelligibility variation across the passage was dependent on speaking style.
CONCLUSIONS
The presence of intelligibility variation within a reading passage warrants careful selection of speech materials in research and clinical practice. Results further indicate that the crowdsourced VAS rating paradigm is useful to document intelligibility in a reading passage for different cued speaking styles commonly used in treatment for dysarthria.
Topics: Cues; Dysarthria; Humans; Parkinson Disease; Speech Acoustics; Speech Intelligibility; Speech Production Measurement
PubMed: 34982941
DOI: 10.1044/2021_AJSLP-21-00151 -
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and... Nov 1981Electromyograms were recorded with hooked-wire electrodes from sixteen lip, tongue and jaw muscles in six normal and seven cerebral palsied adult subjects during a...
Electromyograms were recorded with hooked-wire electrodes from sixteen lip, tongue and jaw muscles in six normal and seven cerebral palsied adult subjects during a variety of speech and non-speech tasks. The recorded patterns of muscle activity fail to support a number of theories concerning the pathophysiology of dysarthria in cerebral palsy. There was no indication of weakness in individual articulator muscles. There was no evidence of uncontrolled sustained background activity or of abnormal tonic stretch reflex responses in lip or tongue muscles. Primitive or pathological reflexes could not be elicited by orofacial stimulation. No imbalance between positive and negative oral responses was observed. The view that random involuntary movement disrupts essentially normal voluntary control in athetosis was not supported. Each cerebral palsied subject displayed an idiosyncratic pattern of abnormal muscle activity which was reproduced across repetitions of the same phrase, indicating a consistent defect in motor programming.
Topics: Adult; Cerebral Palsy; Dysarthria; Electromyography; Humans; Muscles; Reflex; Speech Disorders
PubMed: 7334387
DOI: 10.1136/jnnp.44.11.1013 -
International Journal of... Aug 2019: This study aimed to advance our understanding of how children with dysarthria and cerebral palsy (CP) realise sentence stress acoustically, and how well listeners...
: This study aimed to advance our understanding of how children with dysarthria and cerebral palsy (CP) realise sentence stress acoustically, and how well listeners could identify the position of the stressed word within these utterances. : Seven children with CP and eight typically developing children participated in the experiment. Stress on target words in two sentence positions was elicited through a picture-based question-answer paradigm. Acoustic parameters of stress [duration, intensity and fundamental frequency (F0)] were measured and compared between stressed and unstressed target words. For the perception experiment, ten listeners were asked to determine the position of the stressed word in the children's productions. : Acoustic measures showed that at group level the typically developing children used all three acoustic parameters to mark sentence stress, whereas the children with CP showed changes in duration only. Individual performance variations were evident in both groups. Perceptually, listeners were significantly better at identifying the stressed words in the utterances produced by the typically developing children than those of the children with CP. : The results suggest that children with CP can manipulate temporal speech properties to mark stress. This ability to modulate acoustic-prosodic features could be harnessed in intervention to enhance children's functional communication.
Topics: Adolescent; Cerebral Palsy; Child; Child Language; Dysarthria; Female; Humans; Male; Speech Acoustics; Young Adult
PubMed: 29516763
DOI: 10.1080/17549507.2018.1444093 -
Folia Phoniatrica Et Logopaedica :... 2008The study describes an effort to evaluate the speech difficulties as perceived by individuals with dysarthria. A self-report questionnaire, Living with Neurologically...
The study describes an effort to evaluate the speech difficulties as perceived by individuals with dysarthria. A self-report questionnaire, Living with Neurologically Based Speech Difficulties (Living with Dysarthria), was answered by 55 individuals with varying types and degrees of dysarthria. Results show that both type and degree of subjectively perceived communicative difficulties varied. Degree of communicative difficulties was not related to age, gender, diagnosis, disease duration or employment status in this group. Generally, the overriding problems were related to restrictions in communicative participation, possibilities to actively take part in work and studies and to express one's personality were particularly affected. Communication was also affected by emotions and by the number and familiarity of people present in communicative encounters. The dominating speech difficulties were related to reduced speech rate and a need for repetition as a consequence of misunderstandings. A statistically nonsignificant difference was found between the higher mean of the group with moderate dysarthria compared to the groups with severe and mild dysarthria, indicating that severity of dysarthria does not necessarily predict extent of perceived communicative difficulties. It is concluded that systematic subjective reports should always be included in the assessment of individuals with acquired dysarthria.
Topics: Diagnosis, Differential; Dysarthria; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Parkinsonian Disorders; Severity of Illness Index; Surveys and Questionnaires
PubMed: 18057906
DOI: 10.1159/000111799 -
Severe Obstructive Sleep Apnea in an Adolescent with Hypernasality, Dysarthria, and Muscle Weakness.Annals of the American Thoracic Society Oct 2022
Topics: Adolescent; Dysarthria; Humans; Muscle Weakness; Polysomnography; Sleep Apnea, Obstructive
PubMed: 36178398
DOI: 10.1513/AnnalsATS.202201-030CC -
International Journal of... Apr 2017The purpose is to investigate acoustic and tongue body kinematic vowel dispersion patterns and vowel space in speakers with and without dysarthria secondary to...
PURPOSE
The purpose is to investigate acoustic and tongue body kinematic vowel dispersion patterns and vowel space in speakers with and without dysarthria secondary to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
METHOD
Acoustic and tongue kinematic vowel spaces were examined at the same time sampling point using electromagnetic articulography in 11 speakers with dysarthria secondary to ALS and 11 speakers without dysarthria. Tongue kinematic data were collected from the tongue body sensor (∼25 mm posterior from the tongue apex). A number of acoustic and tongue body kinematic variables were tested.
RESULT
The result showed that the acoustic and tongue kinematic vowel dispersion patterns are different between the groups. Acoustic and tongue body kinematic vowel spaces are highly correlated; however, unlike acoustic vowel space, tongue body kinematic vowel space was not significantly different between the groups.
CONCLUSION
Both acoustic and tongue kinematic vowel dispersion patterns are sensitive to the group difference, especially with high vowels. The tongue kinematic vowel space approach is too crude to differentiate the speakers with dysarthria secondary to ALS from speakers without dysarthria. To examine tongue range of motion in speakers with dysarthria, a more refined articulatory kinematic approach needs to be examined in the future.
Topics: Adult; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis; Biomechanical Phenomena; Dysarthria; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Speech Acoustics; Speech Intelligibility; Speech Production Measurement; Tongue
PubMed: 27336197
DOI: 10.1080/17549507.2016.1193899 -
International Journal of... Jun 2020Approximately 40-50% of people with multiple sclerosis (MS) have dysarthria impacting confidence in communication. This study explored how people with MS experienced a...
Approximately 40-50% of people with multiple sclerosis (MS) have dysarthria impacting confidence in communication. This study explored how people with MS experienced a novel therapeutic approach combining dysarthria therapy with poetry in a group format. Participants were recruited through MSWA (formerly known as the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Western Australia), a leading service provider for people living with all neurological conditions in Western Australia. They attended eight weekly sessions led by a speech pathologist and a professional poet. The study was co-designed and qualitative, using observational field notes recorded during sessions and semi-structured in-depth interviews with participants after programme completion. The results from an informal, unstandardised rating scale of communication confidence, along with standardised voice and speech measures, were used to facilitate discussion about confidence in the interviews. Nine participants with MS completed the group programme. Analysis of the qualitative data revealed participants' positive views regarding the pairing of speech pathology and poetry. Thematic analysis identified four core themes: living with MS and its "series of griefs"; belonging to a group - "meeting with a purpose"; the power of poetry; and poetry as a medium for speech pathology. Poetry in combination with dysarthria therapy represents a novel, interprofessional approach for improving communication confidence in individuals with MS.
Topics: Adult; Aged; Dysarthria; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Multiple Sclerosis; Poetry as Topic; Qualitative Research; Speech Therapy
PubMed: 32212872
DOI: 10.1080/17549507.2020.1739333 -
European Journal of Paediatric... Jul 2007Transient cerebellar mutism is a well-known clinical entity which may develop after surgery to the cerebellum. As the period of mutism is followed by motor speech... (Review)
Review
Transient cerebellar mutism is a well-known clinical entity which may develop after surgery to the cerebellum. As the period of mutism is followed by motor speech deficits, the condition has also been termed the syndrome of (cerebellar) Mutism and Subsequent Dysarthria (MSD). In children, its incidence is estimated between 8% and 31%. Unfortunately, the literature provides contradictory information regarding motor speech production post-mutism. We therefore critically reviewed data on 283 childhood cases to chart the mode of recovery of motor speech production after the mute period. After applying stringent exclusion criteria, we found that 98.8% of the children displayed motor speech deficits. This percentage is much higher than commonly reported in the literature. In addition, recovery of speech appeared to be less favourable than previously ascertained. Future studies should investigate more carefully the patients' speech characteristics in order to be able to offer children an adequate and complete rehabilitation program.
Topics: Adult; Cerebellum; Child; Child, Preschool; Dysarthria; Female; Humans; Infant; Male; Mutism; Postoperative Complications; Recovery of Function
PubMed: 17320435
DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpn.2007.01.007