speech rhythm
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2022 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Dorothée Rösch ◽  
Ethan Taub ◽  
Ute Gschwandtner ◽  
Peter Fuhr

Background:Recent studies suggest movements of speech and gait in patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD) are impaired by a common underlying rhythmic dysfunction. If this being the case, motor deficits in speech and gait should equally benefit from rhythmic interventions regardless of whether it is a speech-specific or step-training-specific approach.Objective:In this intervention trial, we studied the effects of two rhythmic interventions on speech and gait. These rhythmic intervention programs are similar in terms of intensity and frequency (i.e., 3x per week, 45 min-long sessions for 4 weeks in total), but differ regarding therapeutic approach (rhythmic speech vs. rhythmic balance-mobility training).Methods:This study is a cross-over, parallel multi-arms, single blind intervention trial, in which PD patients treated with rhythmic speech-language therapy (rSLT; N = 16), rhythmic balance-mobility training (rBMT; N = 10), or no therapy (NT; N = 18) were compared to healthy controls (HC; N = 17; matched by age, sex, and education: p > 0.82). Velocity and cadence in speech and gait were evaluated at baseline (BL), 4 weeks (4W-T1), and 6 months (6M-T2) and correlated.Results:Parameters in speech and gait (i.e., speaking and walking velocity, as well as speech rhythm with gait cadence) were positively correlated across groups (p < 0.01). Statistical analyses involved repeated measures ANOVA across groups and time, as well as independent and one-samples t-tests for within groups analyses. Statistical analyses were amplified using Reliable Change (RC) and Reliable Change Indexes (RCI) to calculate true clinically significant changes due to the treatment on a patient individual level. Rhythmic intervention groups improved across variables and time (total Mean Difference: 3.07 [SD 1.8]; 95% CI 0.2–11.36]) compared to the NT group, whose performance declined significantly at 6 months (p < 0.01). HC outperformed rBMT and NT groups across variables and time (p < 0.001); the rSLT performed similarly to HC at 4 weeks and 6 months in speech rhythm and respiration.Conclusions:Speech and gait deficits in PD may share a common mechanism in the underlying cortical circuits. Further, rSLT was more beneficial to dysrhythmic PD patients than rBMT, likely because of the nature of the rhythmic cue.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatsuya Daikoku ◽  
Shin-Ichiro Kumagaya ◽  
Satsuki Ayaya ◽  
Yukie Nagai

How typically developed (TD) persons modulate their speech rhythm while talking to individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remains unclear. We aimed to elucidate the characteristics of phonological hierarchy in the verbal communication between ASD individuals and TD persons. TD and ASD respondents were asked by a TD questioner to share their recent experiences on 12 topics. We included 87 samples of ASD-directed speech (from TD questioner to ASD respondent), 72 of TD-directed speech (from TD questioner to TD respondent), 74 of ASD speech (from ASD respondent to TD questioner), and 55 of TD speech (from TD respondent to TD questioner). We analysed the amplitude modulation structures of speech waveforms using probabilistic amplitude demodulation based on Bayesian inference and found similarities between ASD speech and ASD-directed speech and between TD speech and TD-directed speech. Prosody and the interactions between prosodic, syllabic, and phonetic rhythms were significantly weaker in ASD-directed and ASD speech than those in TD-directed and TD speech, respectively. ASD speech showed weaker dynamic processing from higher to lower phonological bands (e.g. from prosody to syllable) than TD speech. The results indicate that TD individuals may spontaneously adapt their phonological characteristics to those of ASD speech.


Loquens ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. e074
Author(s):  
Lei He ◽  
Yu Zhang

Lower modulation rates in the temporal envelope (ENV) of the acoustic signal are believed to be the rhythmic backbone in speech, facilitating speech comprehension in terms of neuronal entrainments at δ- and θ-rates (these rates are comparable to the foot- and syllable-rates phonetically). The jaw plays the role of a carrier articulator regulating mouth opening in a quasi-cyclical way, which correspond to the low-frequency modulations as a physical consequence. This paper describes a method to examine the joint roles of jaw oscillation and ENV in realizing speech rhythm using spectral coherence. Relative powers in the frequency bands corresponding to the δ-and θ-oscillations in the coherence (respectively notated as %δ and %θ) were quantified as one possible way of revealing the amount of concomitant foot- and syllable-level rhythmicities carried by both acoustic and articulatory domains. Two English corpora (mngu0 and MOCHA-TIMIT) were used for the proof of concept. %δ and %θ were regressed on utterance duration for an initial analysis. Results showed that the degrees of foot- and syllable-sized rhythmicities are different and are contingent upon the utterance length.


2021 ◽  
pp. 312-335
Author(s):  
Amalia Arvaniti
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1524
Author(s):  
Ingrid Aichert ◽  
Katharina Lehner ◽  
Simone Falk ◽  
Mona Späth ◽  
Mona Franke ◽  
...  

In the present study, we investigated if individuals with neurogenic speech sound impairments of three types, Parkinson’s dysarthria, apraxia of speech, and aphasic phonological impairment, accommodate their speech to the natural speech rhythm of an auditory model, and if so, whether the effect is more significant after hearing metrically regular sentences as compared to those with an irregular pattern. This question builds on theories of rhythmic entrainment, assuming that sensorimotor predictions of upcoming events allow humans to synchronize their actions with an external rhythm. To investigate entrainment effects, we conducted a sentence completion task relating participants’ response latencies to the spoken rhythm of the prime heard immediately before. A further research question was if the perceived rhythm interacts with the rhythm of the participants’ own productions, i.e., the trochaic or iambic stress pattern of disyllabic target words. For a control group of healthy speakers, our study revealed evidence for entrainment when trochaic target words were preceded by regularly stressed prime sentences. Persons with Parkinson’s dysarthria showed a pattern similar to that of the healthy individuals. For the patient groups with apraxia of speech and with phonological impairment, considerably longer response latencies with differing patterns were observed. Trochaic target words were initiated with significantly shorter latencies, whereas the metrical regularity of prime sentences had no consistent impact on response latencies and did not interact with the stress pattern of the target words to be produced. The absence of an entrainment in these patients may be explained by the more severe difficulties in initiating speech at all. We discuss the results in terms of clinical implications for diagnostics and therapy in neurogenic speech disorders.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1303
Author(s):  
Tamara Rathcke ◽  
Chia-Yuan Lin

Developmental dyslexia is typically defined as a difficulty with an individual’s command of written language, arising from deficits in phonological awareness. However, motor entrainment difficulties in non-linguistic synchronization and time-keeping tasks have also been reported. Such findings gave rise to proposals of an underlying rhythm processing deficit in dyslexia, even though to date, evidence for impaired motor entrainment with the rhythm of natural speech is rather scarce, and the role of speech rhythm in phonological awareness is unclear. The present study aimed to fill these gaps. Dyslexic adults and age-matched control participants with variable levels of previous music training completed a series of experimental tasks assessing phoneme processing, rhythm perception, and motor entrainment abilities. In a rhythm entrainment task, participants tapped along to the perceived beat of natural spoken sentences. In a phoneme processing task, participants monitored for sonorant and obstruent phonemes embedded in nonsense strings. Individual sensorimotor skills were assessed using a number of screening tests. The results lacked evidence for a motor impairment or a general motor entrainment difficulty in dyslexia, at least among adult participants of the study. Instead, the results showed that the participants’ performance in the phonemic task was predictive of their performance in the rhythmic task, but not vice versa, suggesting that atypical rhythm processing in dyslexia may be the consequence, but not the cause, of dyslexic difficulties with phoneme-level encoding. No evidence for a deficit in the entrainment to the syllable rate in dyslexic adults was found. Rather, metrically weak syllables were significantly less often at the center of rhythmic attention in dyslexic adults as compared to neurotypical controls, with an increased tendency in musically trained participants. This finding could not be explained by an auditory deficit in the processing of acoustic-prosodic cues to the rhythm structure, but it is likely to be related to the well-documented auditory short-term memory issue in dyslexia.


Author(s):  
Pier Marco Bertinetto

Speech rhythm is a popular research topic but a still poorly understood phenomenon. A critical assessment of the algorithmic tools developed in the last two decades to analyze rhythm in natural languages shows that they can at best lead to a topological arrangement of the languages to be compared, with no ambition to actually offer objective and absolute measures. Besides, all available tools are heavily influenced by any source of variability, in particular: speech rate, speech style (most notably, spontaneous vs. read), and even speaker identity. Although this shows their high sensitivity to the input details, it raises severe doubts as for the actual relevance of the comparative results obtained in the study of different languages. Future research will have to learn to overcome these weaknesses. Most importantly, readers should be alerted to the false idol of a common Romance rhythmic footprint. Close inspection of the prosodic characteristics of the main Romance languages indicates that the differences are indeed remarkable and likely to feed diverging rhythmical behaviors. Besides, one should take into account the vast intrafamily variability, up to the tiniest local vernaculars, which often diverge in extraordinary ways from the ‘roof’ language supposed to constitute a sort of common denominator.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. e577
Author(s):  
Pablo Arantes ◽  
Ronaldo Mangueira Lima Júnior

This paper presents preliminary results of a semi-automatic methodology to extract three parameters of a dynamic model of speech rhythm. The model attempts to analyze the production of rhythm as a system of coupled oscillators which represent syllabicity and phrase stress as levels of temporal organization. The estimated parameters are the syllabic oscillator entrainment rate (alpha), the syllabic oscillator decay rate (beta), and the coupling strength between the oscillators (w0). The methodology involves finding the <alpha, beta, w0> combination that minimizes the distance between natural duration contours and simulated contours generated using several combinations of the parameters. The distance between natural and model-generated contours was measured in two ways by comparing: (1) plain or overt syllable to syllable duration and (2) relative change along both contours.We applied this methodology to read speech produced by five speakers of the state of Ceará (CE) and eight speakers of the state of São Paulo (SP). Mean w0 and alpha values are compatible with the view that Brazilian Portuguese is a mixed-rhythm language. Results from two bayesian hierarchical regression models do not suggest a difference between SP and CE speakers, but indicate a difference between the two methods, with the relative change method generating lower alpha values and higher w0 values, and the reverse for the plain duration method.


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