ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2002
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2002

Effects of pharmacological versus electrophysiological treatments on Parkinsonian dysprosody

François Viallet, Bernard Teston, Ludovic Jankowski, Alain Purson, Jean Claude Peragut, Jean Regis, Tatiana Witjas

Dysprosody represents an essential part of the lack of speech intelligibility in Parkinson disease. To date, patients’ management has been based on two therapeutic interventions: L-DOPA medication and/or sub-thalamic nucleus (STN) stimulation. Herein, we studied speech production in two groups of ten patients (one group for each treatment), by means of three prosodic parameters: pitch, intensity, and duration.

The results of this study show a clear effect only on the pitch parameter (mean F0 and F0 standard deviation) with either treatment: L-DOPA or STN stimulation. No significant change was obtained on either intensity or duration with these treatments.