P2‐254: Automated Prosodic Markers in Natural Connected Speech of Als and Als‐ftd Are Associated With Cognitive Impairment
Year: 2019
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Natural speech has rarely been studied in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), yet impairments were reported in narrative production, sentence and grammatical processing and action comprehenssion. Major limitations in conducting such studies are related to the intensive manual labor of analyzing transcripts and extracting prosodic markers from the acoustic signal. Automated methods for speech analysis may greatly improve our ability to study both textual and acoustic properties of natural connected speech in ALS. We implemented an automated Speech Activity Detector (SAD) to analyze speech samples of a picture description task from 68 speakers with ALS, 13 of whom had concomitant cognitive impairments (ALS+cog): 2 mild cognitive impairment, 5 behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), 2 non-fluent primary progressive aphasia (naPPA), 4 undefined FTD phenotype. We extracted the fundamental frequency (f0), which is the longest estimated periodicity of a complex sound wave and calculated f0 range. Additionally, speech and silence segment durations were used to calculate total speech time, mean speech and pause segment durations, pause count and rate. We compared the patients’ prosodic markers with those of 37 healthy controls (HC) and two cognitive control groups with either bvFTD (n=90) or naPPA (n=23) and no motor disease. We associated prosodic markers in ALS with clinical measures of severity (FVC – Forced Vital Capacity, ALSFRS – ALS Functional Rating Scale, ECAS– Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioral ALS Screen). The ALS+cog group had a prosodic pattern distinct from pure motor ALS, including a restricted f0 range (mean 3.7±1.6 ST vs. 5.0±2.0 ST respectively, p=0.03, controlled for demographic variation); increased pause rate (mean 46.2±16.9 vs. 36.1±16.5 ppm, p=0.04) and reduced total speech time (mean 25.5±11.6 vs. 42.5±16.1 sec, p=0.003). ALS+cog resembled the bvFTD and naPPA groups in all of these prosodic markers, except for pause rate, where naPPA had a higher rate. Within the entire ALS cohort total speech time was associated with ECAS total score and ALS-specific subscore (r=0.3, p=0.04 for both), however, we found no correlation between prosodic markers and severity of motor impairment.
Source: Alzheimer s & Dementia
Language: English
Topic: Voice and Speech Disorders
Subfield: Physiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2980482182