Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Parkinson Disease
Conditions
Keywords
Dysarthria, Speech motor performance, Speech motor control, Speech kinematics
Brief summary
The goal is to improve the fundamental knowledge about articulatory motor performance in people with Lou Gehrig's disease (also known as ALS) and Parkinson's disease (PD), in order to develop more sensitive assessments for progressive speech loss, which may lead to the improved timing of speech therapies.
Detailed description
The long-term goal is to optimize dysarthria assessment by improving the early detection and tracking of articulatory performance in progressive dysarthrias. The short-term goal of the proposed cross-sectional study is to focus on ALS and PD and quantify articulatory kinematic performance as a function of phonetic complexity, which is experimentally manipulated based on theoretical principles of speech motor development. The research strategy is to use 3D electromagnetic articulography to examine phonetic complexity effects of single word stimuli at the articulatory kinematic level in 15 talkers each with preclinical, mild, and moderate dysarthria, relative to 45 controls. The central hypothesis is that as dysarthria severity increases the discrepancy in articulatory performance, indexed by movement speed, distance, coordination, and variability, between people with dysarthria and typical controls will significantly increase at a lower phonetic complexity level.
Interventions
Use of 3D electromagnetic articulography to examine phonetic complexity effects of single word stimuli at the articulatory kinematic level in talkers each with preclinical, mild, and moderate dysarthria, relative to healthy controls.
Sponsors
Study design
Intervention model description
Two groups of participants i.e., participants with ALS or PD and healthy controls will be asked to repeat sentences that have target words with varying phonetic complexity.
Eligibility
Inclusion criteria
1. May or may not have a neurological impairment. 2. Age range of 19-90 years. 3. Male or female. 4. Provide written consent before any study specific procedures are performed. 5. Have ability to comply with basic instructions. 6. Monolingual English speaker. 7. Have ability to partake in a 90 minute data collection.
Exclusion criteria
1. Any speech, language, cognition, or hearing impairment prior to diagnosis of a neurodegenerative disease. 2. Anyone not appropriate for study participation, as deemed by the principal investigator.
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Peak movement speed | Up to 3 months after enrollment | Peak speed (millimeters/second) for each articulatory marker is the maximum value of the first-order derivative of each marker's Euclidean distance time-history. |
| Range of movement | Up to 3 months after enrollment | The convex hull represents the smallest convex set containing all the points in the 3D motion path. |
| Duration | Up to 3 months after enrollment | Word duration (seconds) is the time between onset and offset of movement for each word. |
| Spatiotemporal movement variability (STI) | Up to 3 months after enrollment | STI is the most widely used metric to capture movement pattern variability during speech. To determine STI, the pattern of articulatory movements and the variability of that pattern over several repetitions of an utterance are examined. |
| Inter-articulator coordination | Up to 3 months after enrollment | Spatiotemporal coupling relations between articulators will be derived from vertical movements of the articulators using a covariance measure. |
Countries
United States