Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0013362 (dysarthria)
 3,768 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Prosody is a complex process that involves modulation of pitch, loudness, duration, and linearity in the acoustic stream to serve linguistic and affective communication goals. It arises from the interaction of distributed neural networks that may be anatomically and functionally lateralized. Intrinsic prosody is mediated largely through left hemisphere mechanisms and encompasses those elements of linguistic microstructure (e.g., syllabic magnitudes and durations, basic consonantal and vocalic gesture specifications, and so) that yield the segmental aspects of speech. Extrinsic prosody is processed primarily by right hemisphere (RH) mechanisms and involves manipulation of intonation across longer perceptual groupings. Intrinsic prosody deficits can lead to several core symptoms of speech apraxia such as difficulty with utterance initiation and syllable transitionalization and may lead to the establishment of inappropriate syllable boundaries. The intrinsic prosody profiles associated with acquired apraxia of speech, developmental speech apraxia, and ataxic dysarthria may aid in the clinical differentiation of these disorders.
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PMID:Prosody in apraxia of speech. 1246 24

This study examines the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) on communicative efficiency conveyed through prosody. A new assessment method for evaluating productive prosodic skills in Dutch speaking dysarthric patients was devised and tested on 36 individuals (18 controls, 18 PD patients). Three professional listeners judged the intended meanings in four communicative functions of Dutch prosody: Boundary Marking, Focus, Sentence Typing, and Emotional Prosody. Each function was tested through reading and imitation. Interrater agreement was calculated. Results indicated that healthy speakers, compared to PD patients, performed significantly better on imitation of Boundary Marking, Focus, and Sentence Typing. PD patients with a moderate or severe dysarthria performed significantly worse on imitation of Focus than on reading of Focus. No significant differences were found for Emotional Prosody. Judges agreed well on all tasks except Emotional Prosody. Future research will focus on elaborating the assessment and on developing a therapy programme paralleling the assessment.
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PMID:Assessment of prosodic communicative efficiency in Parkinson's disease as judged by professional listeners. 2196 16