Evaluating the Performance of Diadochokinetic Tests in Characterizing Parkinson’s Disease Hypokinetic Dysarthria

Pedro Gómez-Vilda*, Andrés Gómez-Rodellar, Daniel Palacios-Alonso, Athanasios Tsanas

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

Hypokinetic Dysarthria (HD) is a hampering speech symptom appearing as a consequence of Parkinson’s Disease (PD). HD has been traditionally evaluated using diadochokinetic tests such as the fast repetition of monosyllables as [pa], [ta], and [ka] and multisyllable sequences [pataka] and [pakata] towards assessing speech performance. However, the practical validity of these tests in assessing the speech of a person with PD (PwP) to assess performance degradation and infer PD-related symptoms has not been thoroughly investigated. The aim of the present work is to explore the performance of tests consisting in a monosyllabic repetition [..tatata..] vs a multisyllable one [..pataka..]). The methodology proposed is based on estimating distributions of syllable and inter-syllable interval durations obtained from diadichokinetic tests using Kolmogorov-Smirnov Approximations (KSA), and comparing the resulting distributions by means of Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) to assess the efficiency of both types of tests confronting utterances from Healthy Controls (HC) with the ones from PD participants. The results from the evaluation of 30 gender-balanced participants, 18 PwP and 12 HC, show that the monosyllable test does not appear to differentiate well between the two cohorts, whereas the multisyllable test shows better performance. Although the relatively small sample size suggests findings should be cautiously interpreted, they tentatively underline the need to use the most adequate tests to assess HD diadochokinetic performance.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBiomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - 14th International Joint Conference, BIOSTEC 2021, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsClaudine Gehin, Bruno Wacogne, Alexandre Douplik, Ronny Lorenz, Bethany Bracken, Cátia Pesquita, Ana Fred, Ana Fred, Hugo Gamboa
PublisherSpringer
Pages102-119
Number of pages18
ISBN (Print)9783031206634
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2022
Event14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, BIOSTEC 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 11 Feb 202113 Feb 2021

Publication series

NameCommunications in Computer and Information Science
Volume1710 CCIS
ISSN (Print)1865-0929
ISSN (Electronic)1865-0937

Conference

Conference14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, BIOSTEC 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period11/02/2113/02/21

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Hypokinetic dysarthria
  • Parkinson’s disease
  • Speech diadochokinetic exercises

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