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Chelsey Tuttle
This paper is going to discuss the speech intelligibility of an individual who has a
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Both of these types of disorders are ones that can inhibit
the production of syllables. Without the correct production and smoothness of transitions
difficulty for someone to understand them. This paper is going to justify whether or not
not. By doing so, we will also be able to clarify if the second-formant transition rate,
Speech intelligibility is important to this particular study and is defined as, the
accuracy with which a normal listener can convey a spoken word or phrase, according to
Yorkston and Beukelman (1980) (Kent & Weismer, 1989). The speech intelligibility of
patients with ALS and the slope of the transition of the second formant (F2) frequency
are what are measured in order to determine if the patients are considered intelligible or
Dysarthria is a speech disorder that results from damage to the nerves and/or
motor speech. Dysarthria is also known to occur at the later stages of motor
Hyperkinetic Dysarthria patients have had some sort of a lesion to their basal
disease, because it pertains to the corticobulbar tract and the indirect motor tract, the
basal ganglia. This is where some sort of damage is done, causing there to be problems.
There are excessive movements in hyperkinesias that include different types of tics and
and/or amplitude of vocal fold vibration, which is perceived as a tremble quality in the
voice. The pitch may be too low, too high, lack variety, or could even sound like two
pitches are occurring at the same time. The loudness level could occur in jerky bursts,
may be too great, or may not be great enough. The resonance disorders could cause
compressed. There are several types of tremors, however the one that pertains to an
Organic Voice Tremor is what is known as the Essential tremor. This tremor is a tremor
that usually occurs in middle age. It consists of involuntary rhythmic movements of the
head, face, tongue, jaw, laryngeal muscles, arms, and hands. It can be treated with
In order to bridge the gap between a patient with Hyperkinetic Dysarthria with an
Organic Voice Tremor and those with ALS to be explained is going to take place
throughout the duration of this study by explaining whether or not the information of a
METHOD
Hyperkinetic Dysarthria’s Effect On Articulation 4
In this particular study the patient was previously diagnosed with Hyperkinetic
dysarthria with an Organic Voice Tremor. The 72-year-old male read the passage
entitled, My Grandfather Passage (Aronson & Brown, 1969). For this particular study
the patient just read the first half of the passage. The words of importance for this
particular study included only those that contain a stop consonant with a vowel that
followed. As the patient read this particular part of the passage, the words that fit into the
previous category was as followed: to, coat, buttons, beard, and giving. This information
was entered into a program called, PRAAT. PRAAT is a computer-based software that
was designed to analyze speech in phonetics. PRAAT is used to allow students and
PRAAT is used specifically in this study to measure the slopes of the second
formant transitions of those stop consonant-vowel syllables: to, coat, buttons, beard, and
giving, in the passage that are in word-initial position and receive either primary or
secondary stress. In order to be able to find those slopes it is necessary to isolate the
stop-vowel syllable by finding the transition from the end of the consonant to the end of
the vowel. This is the portion of the stop-vowel consonant syllable that is measured.
This particular portion of the passage was put into a spectrogram to be able to
listen and see the data properly. It is necessary to have the entire passage in the
spectrogram, causing the seconds to be changed to 330 seconds in the analysis portion of
PRAAT. The dynamic range could also be changed to 45 dB in order to make the
necessary that the syllables are isolated, so only the initial onsets of the vowels, which is
indicated on the spectrogram as a white vertical line on the spectrogram, until the offset,
This information was then taken and compared to that from the Kent & Kent
(1989) study. Finding the interquartile range, as well as the median, from the normative
data, the ALS data, and the Hyperkinetic Dysarthria data did this. Once the median of
each data was found, the lower half is considered the lower quartile and the higher half is
considered to be the upper quartile. Once these were found, the median of those also
needs to be found and that is known as the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile,
respectively. Next, it was time to find the interquartile range of all of this data by
RESULTS
Now that the Hyperkinetic Dysarthria with an Organic Voice Tremor patients data
has been compared to that of the ALS patient and normative data in the Kent & Kent
(1989) study it is easy to look at the tables to compile the data. In Table 1 it shows the
stop-consonant vowel syllables as well as the entire word. It also indicates what the
second-formant frequency transition rate was for the Hyperkinetic Dysarthria patient.
This table also shows the median and the interquartile range for this particular disorder as
well. Table 2 is showing the data that was collected in the Kent & Kent (1989) study,
Hyperkinetic Dysarthria’s Effect On Articulation 6
which is the median and interquartile range values for all three categories: normative
data, ALS data, and the Hyperkinetic Dysarthria data. After looking at the data, the final
result concludes that the transition rate of the second formant frequency for those ALS
patients was intelligible when compared to the normative data. The Kent & Kent (1989)
study shows that the normative data has an interquartile range of .61 and a median of 3.2.
Thus, stating that the normative male that was studied does have intelligible speech
according to Kent & Kent (1989). The data that stated they were 90% above, meaning
above the 2.5 marker for the formant frequency, are considered intelligible, where those
that fell below 2.5 were considered to be unintelligible (Kent & Kent, 1989). Table 2
shows that the ALS data is as following, .89 for the interquartile range and 2.6 for the
median, meaning that the ALS patient is also considered to have intelligible speech. The
results of they Hyperkinetic Dysarthria patient are also listed here, showing that they two
DISCUSSION
Tremor disorder can be generalized to the patient with ALS in the Kent & Kent (1989)
study. The reason this statement is made is because both of the data for the two disorders
considers them to have speech intelligibility. The second formant frequencies that were
collected from each of the patients indicate that they can indeed be generalized with one
another. A Hyperkinetic Dysarthria with an Organic Voice Tremor patient clearly has
different symptoms and other neurological defects compared to that of an ALS patient,
Hyperkinetic Dysarthria’s Effect On Articulation 7
however they are both able to be considered intelligible speakers, pertaining to this
whether or not it is generalized to all types of the various kinds of Dysarthria. It is not
assumed that any particular test for intelligibility is something that is going to be able to
satisfy every specific purpose in the actual assessment for intelligibility (Kent &
Weismer, 1989). Therefore, intelligibility is something that is sometimes quite vague and
There are many dysarthria disorders that people struggle with on a daily basis and
disorder varies and these two disorders in particular, ALS and Hyperkinetic Dysarthria
with an Organic Voice Tremor, just so happen to fall under the same category when
REFERENCES
Aronson, A., and Brown, J. (1969) Study of motor speech disorders. Journal of Speech
Kent, R.D., Kent, J.F., Weismer, G., Sufit, R.L., Brooks, B.R., & Rosenbek, J.C. (1989).
Kent, R.D., Wesimer, G., Kent, J.F., & Rosenbek, J.C. (1989). Toward phonetic
482-499.
Hyperkinetic Dysarthria’s Effect On Articulation 9
Table 1
Transition Rates in Hz/ms for Stop Consonants and Vowel Syllables in a Hyperkinetic
Dysarthria Organic Voice Tremor Patient
Median: 2.8
Interquartile Range: 1.7
This data above is from a study on a Hyperkinetic Dysarthria – Organic Voice Tremor
Patient.
Table 2
Transition Rates in Hz/ms for Stop Consonants and Vowels Syllables in the Current
Study for Kent et al 1998
This data above is obtained from the Kent & Kent (1989) study on ALS patients as well
as a normal patient.