Speech pauses and gestural holds in Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) belongs to a class of neurodegenerative diseases that affect the patient’s speech, motor, and cognitive capabilities. All three deÞcits affect the multimodal communication channels of speech and gesture. We presenta study on the changes in speech pause patterns and gesture holds before and after treatment. We present the results of a pilot study of two Idiopathic PD patients who have undergone Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT). We show that therewas a consistentchangein the location of pauses with respect to semantic sentential utterance units. After treatment, the number and duration of pauses within sentential units decreased while the inter sentential pauses increased. This indicates reduction in hesitation and increase in speech phrasing. We also found a decrease in the number of sentence repairs and the time spent in repairs. For gesture, we found that non-rest holds intersecting with within-sentence pauses appears to decline after treatment, as does the ratio of rest holds during speechagainst rest holds between sentences. While the work is preliminary, these patterns suggest that multimodal discourse characteristics might provide accessto the underlying cognitive state under the load of narrative discourse.