Temporal acoustic measures of dysarthria associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The purpose of this study was to investigate stop-gap duration, voice onset time (VOT), and vowel duration in intelligible speakers with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Broadband sound spectrograms were used to measure 8 normal and 8 ALS speakers' intelligible speech productions of monosyllabic words containing word-initial stop-plosive consonants (/p, t, k, b, d, g/). Significant differences were found between the two groups for both vowel duration and stop-gap duration; moreover, correlational analysis indicated that the ALS speakers, as a group, exhibited a direct relationship between stop-gap and vowel durations associated with productions of /t/ and /k/. No significant differences were found between the two talker groups for VOT. Results will be related to the neuroanatomical and physiological mechanisms involved in dysarthric (ALS) speech.
D000368:Aged; D000690:Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis / Q000150:complications*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D004401:Dysarthria / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013062:Speech Articulation Tests; D013064:Speech Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D013065:Speech Intelligibility / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality