Previous studies on Italian speech showed that the percentage of vocalic portion in the utterance (%V) and the duration of the interval between two consecutive vowel onset points (VtoV) were larger for parkinsonian (PD) than for healthy controls (HC). Especially, the values of %V were distinctly separated between PD and HC. The present study aimed to further test the finding on Mandarin and Polish. Twenty-five Mandarin speakers (13 PD and 12 HC matched on age) and thirty-one Polish speakers (18 PD and 13 HC matched on age) read aloud a passage of story. The recorded speeches were segmented into vocalic and consonantal intervals, and then %V and VtoV were calculated. For both languages, VtoV overlapped between HC and PD. For Polish, %V was distinctly higher in PD than in HC, while for Mandarin there was no significant difference. It suggests that %V could be used for automatic diagnosis of PD for Italian and Polish, but not for Mandarin. The effectiveness of the rhythmic metric appears to be language-dependent, varying with the rhythmic typology of the language.
Cite as: Pettorino, M., Gu, W., Półrola, P., Fan, P. (2017) Rhythmic Characteristics of Parkinsonian Speech: A Study on Mandarin and Polish. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 3172-3176, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-850
@inproceedings{pettorino17_interspeech,
author={Massimo Pettorino and Wentao Gu and Paweł Półrola and Ping Fan},
title={{Rhythmic Characteristics of Parkinsonian Speech: A Study on Mandarin and Polish}},
year=2017,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2017},
pages={3172--3176},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2017-850}
}