Steadiness of syllable repetition in early motor stages of Parkinson's disease
Steadiness of syllable repetition was found to be impaired in speakers with early motor Parkinson's disease (PD). Maximum velocity of syllable repetition was similar in patients with PD and healthy control speakers. Abnormal patterns of basic motor speech performance could discriminate PD speakers from healthy controls. Measurement of syllable repetition capacity could help to detect subtle abnormalities of basic motor speech performance in early stage PD.
pd parkinson's disease h&y hoehn and yahr classification of the stage of parkinson's disease updrs iii unified parkinson's disease rating scale part iii (motor section) sd standard deviation vkt vowel keeping time (in milliseconds) maxsylrep maximum syllable repetition rate (in syllables per second) intdur interval duration avintdur average interval duration cov coefficient of variance %pa percentual pace acceleration fmri functional magnetic resonance imaging