BACKGROUND:The EARLYSTIM trial demonstrated for Parkinson's disease patients with early motor complications that deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN-DBS) and best medical treatment (BMT) was superior to BMT alone. OBJECTIVE:This prospective, ancillary study on EARLYSTIM compared changes in blinded speech intelligibility assessment between STN-DBS and BMT over 2 years, and secondary outcomes included non-speech oral movements (maximum phonation time [MPT], oral diadochokinesis), physician- and patient-reported assessments. METHODS:STN-DBS (n = 102) and BMT (n = 99) groups underwent assessments on/off medication at baseline and 24 months (in four conditions: on/off medication, ON/OFF stimulation-for STN-DBS). Words and sentences were randomly presented to blinded listeners, and speech intelligibility rate was measured. Statistical analyses compared changes between the STN-DBS and BMT groups from baseline to 24 months. RESULTS:Over the 2-year period, changes in speech intelligibility and MPT, as well as patient-reported outcomes, were not different between groups, either off or on medication or OFF or ON stimulation, but most outcomes showed a nonsignificant trend toward worsening in both groups. Change in oral diadochokinesis was significantly different between STN-DBS and BMT groups, on medication and OFF STN-DBS, with patients in the STN-DBS group performing slightly worse than patients under BMT only. A signal for clinical worsening with STN-DBS was found for the individual speech item of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale, Part III. CONCLUSION:At this early stage of the patients' disease, STN-DBS did not result in a consistent deterioration in blinded speech intelligibility assessment and patient-reported communication, as observed in studies of advanced Parkinson's Disease. © 2022 The Authors. Movement Disorders published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.

We investigated whether the mean duration of syllables in utterances of different length in Brazilian Portuguese conform to Menzerath-Altmann's law. Furthermore, by analysing the same spoken material of twenty recorded speakers, we tested for individual differences in the parameters used to formalise the law. The log-transform of the syllable duration was the dependent variable in a linear mixed model with the log-transform of the number of syllables in the utterance as a predictor. Adding a random intercept accounted for the variability across the speakers, but a random slope by speaker did not improve the model. We conclude that Menzerath-Altmann's law fits our data well, but the decreasing tendency is not different from speaker to speaker.

This study addresses the issue of the interactional achievement of storytelling in French face-to-face conversations. Previous studies have described storytelling as a joint activity in which together, narrator and listener actively collaborate for a successful achievement. The main findings were either based on qualitative studies (Conversational Analysis) or established in experimental conditions that did not really fit the conversational context. Using the Corpus of Interactional Data, we argue that conversational storytelling can now be described in a more quantitative perspective in the scope of the emergent corpus-pragmatics approach. Turn, morpho-syntactic information and laughter are investigated. We test to what extent the temporal evolution of these components within speech production of each speaker throughout narratives provides evidence in favor of joint activity, i.e. co-narration systematically performed by both participants and resulting in a specific turn-taking organization. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This Event-Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates the use of prosodic information in the process of lexical access in French.In French, accentuation is said to be post-lexical, with a primary final accent (FA) and secondary initial accent (IA) marking the edges of the phrase.Results from previous studies, however, suggest IA may hold a demarcative function close to the level of the word.Still, the contribution of IA in word processing has not yet been empirically tested.In this study, participants listened to trisyllabic French nouns and pseudowords, with (+IA) or without (-IA) initial accent while completing a lexical decision task.We were mainly interested in modulations of the N325, a component assumed to reflect difficulties in the extraction of lexical stress patterns.ERP results show a larger N325 when stimuli were presented -IA, revealing both the automaticity of stress extraction and a preference for stress templates with initial accent.

The objective of this paper was to identify the determining factors of the glottal prephonatory configuration from the point of view of the resulting muscular actions (i.e., arytenoids adduction, membranous vocal fold adduction, and tension).21 human non-embalmed excised larynges (12 females and 9 males) were studied. Experiment A (11 larynges) studied four conditions of adduction of the vocal folds and arytenoids. Experiment B (10 larynges) studied the effect of cricothyroid approximation on the vocal fold length and the cricothyroid angle.Experiment A: The mean glottal area significantly decreased from 41.2 mm(2) mean with no adduction, to 10.2 mm(2) mean with arytenoid adduction, to 9.2 mm(2) with membranous vocal fold adduction, and down to 1.1 mm(2) with the combination of arytenoid and membranous adduction. The effect of the task was statistically significant. Experiment B: The length of vocal folds increased from 13.61 mm median to 14.48 mm median, and the cricothyroid angle decreased of 10.05 median along with cricothyroid approximation.The results of experiment A emphasize the sub-division of adductor intrinsic muscles in arytenoids adductors (i.e., LCA and IA), and membranous vocal fold adductor (i.e., TA). The results of experiment B quantify the effect of cricothyroid approximation on the vocal folds length. The implications of these results can be useful in both clinical practice and experimental studies.

1 Aix-Marseille Université/CNRS, Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL), UMR 7309, 13100, Aix-en-Provence, France 2 Université Grenoble-Alpes, 38000, Grenoble, France 3 INSERM U836 – Grenoble Institut des Neurosciences, 38000, Grenoble, France 4 Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Nijmegen, The Netherlands 5 Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Grenoble, 38000, Grenoble, France 6 Université Lyon I/CNRS, Centre de Neurosciences Cognitives, UMR 5229, Lyon, France 7 Hôpitaux Universitaires, Genève, Switzerland

Improvement of gait disorders following pedunculopontine nucleus area stimulation in patients with Parkinson's disease has previously been reported and led us to propose this surgical treatment to patients who progressively developed severe gait disorders and freezing despite optimal dopaminergic drug treatment and subthalamic nucleus stimulation. The outcome of our prospective study on the first six patients was somewhat mitigated, as freezing of gait and falls related to freezing were improved by low frequency electrical stimulation of the pedunculopontine nucleus area in some, but not all, patients. Here, we report the speech data prospectively collected in these patients with Parkinson's disease. Indeed, because subthalamic nucleus surgery may lead to speech impairment and a worsening of dysarthria in some patients with Parkinson's disease, we felt it was important to precisely examine any possible modulations of speech for a novel target for deep brain stimulation. Our results suggested a trend towards speech degradation related to the pedunculopontine nucleus area surgery (off stimulation) for aero-phonatory control (maximum phonation time), phono-articulatory coordination (oral diadochokinesis) and speech intelligibility. Possibly, the observed speech degradation may also be linked to the clinical characteristics of the group of patients. The influence of pedunculopontine nucleus area stimulation per se was more complex, depending on the nature of the task: it had a deleterious effect on maximum phonation time and oral diadochokinesis, and mixed effects on speech intelligibility. Whereas levodopa intake and subthalamic nucleus stimulation alone had no and positive effects on speech dimensions, respectively, a negative interaction between the two treatments was observed both before and after pedunculopontine nucleus area surgery. This combination effect did not seem to be modulated by pedunculopontine nucleus area stimulation. Although limited in our group of patients, speech impairment following pedunculopontine nucleus area stimulation is a possible outcome that should be considered before undertaking such surgery. Deleterious effects could be dependent on electrode insertion in this brainstem structure, more than on current spread to nearby structures involved in speech control. The effect of deep brain stimulation on speech in patients with Parkinson's disease remains a challenging and exploratory research area.

Contexte : La maladie de Parkinson est une affection neurodegenerative. L’evolution mene, a plus ou moins breve echeance, inexorablement vers le declin moteur. La L-Dopa et la stimulation du noyau subthalamique en constituent des traite-ments majeurs. Notre objectif dans ce travail est d’evaluer, a partir de la mesure de parame - tres aerodynamiques, l’effet dans le temps de ces thera - pies au cours de l’evolution de la maladie. Patients, materiel et methodes : 51 patients ont ete en - registres pendant la repetition de la phrase « papa ne m’a pas parle de beau-papa ». 24 parmi les 51 patients ont ete enregistres dans quatre conditions (ON et OFF DOPA/STIM) et les 27 autres patients ont ete enregistres seulement dans deux conditions (ON/OFF STIM). Les en - registrements ont ete effectues a l’aide du systeme d’eva - luation vocale Eva 2 a differents moments d’un intervalle de temps allant de 0 a 300 mois et plus. L’analyse statis - tique a fait appel a un modele mixte lineaire. Resultats : Nos resultats ont montre une amelioration du- rable et statistiquement significative de la pression intra orale (PIO) et du debit d’air oral moyen (DAOM) durant l’intervalle de temps etudie. Pour la resistance laryngee (RL), aucune amelioration statistiquement significative n’a ete notee durant l’intervalle de temps considere. Conclusion : La L-Dopa et la stimulation du NST semblent etre efficaces de facon durable sur la PIO et le DAOM au cours de la maladie de Parkinson. Par contre la RL repond moins bien a l’action des deux therapies.

Dyslexia is widely associated to a massive phonological awareness deficit. This deficit leads to difficulties in grapheme to phoneme conversions in reading and difficulties in words and sentences productions. The origin of the phonological deficit is partially explained by the magnocellular, cerebellar and articulatory theories. Recently, an increasing number of studies demonstrated the relationship between prosody and reading and, more specifically, the potential key role of suprasegmental phonology in the healthy development of phonological representations. The aim of this study is to explore part of prosodic features in dyslexics and normal developing children in reading and narration tasks, in French. We examined reading accuracy, reading rate for the reading task. We also analyzed pauses frequency and duration, and duration of syllables for each group and each speech condition. Results show correct decoding skills for all subjects but a lack of automation of this procedure for dyslexics. Differences in pauses frequency and duration, observed between dyslexics and controls confirm the link between prosodic reading and automaticity. The longer pause duration in narrative form a temporal feature of dyslexic's production. This temporal characteristic reflects the cognitive cost done by a speech generation task involving lexical selection, syntactic planning and articulatory programming processes. This result is a first step towards evidence of a suprasegmental phonological deficit in spoken language that could be an early marker of later reading difficulties

This study investigates stress processing through the Event-Related brain Potential (ERP) technique. It aims at evaluating whether French listeners can perceive and discriminate the Initial Accent (IA) and whether IA is encoded in the phonological representation. Participants listened to trisyllabic words in two stress-pattern conditions, with (+IA) or without (-IA) initial accenting, in an oddball paradigm. The EEG was recorded in both a passive and an active listening task, and in two di erent oddball versions: one where standard stimuli were +IA words and deviants -IA words, and the reverse for the other version (-IA standard, +IA deviant). Behavioral results show faster processing and less errors for +IA stimuli. ERP results show larger MisMatch Negativity component for -IA words, pointing out 1) that French listeners are sensitive to f0 manipulation, and 2) that +IA is the preferred stress template in French. Altogether, our results indicate that French listeners not only discriminate stress patterns but that IA is encoded in long-term memory, hence phonologically relevant.

Dyslexia is widely associated to a massive phonological awareness deficit. This deficit leads to difficulties in grapheme to phoneme conversions in reading and difficulties in words and sentences productions. The origin of the phonological deficit is partially explained by the magnocellular, cerebellar and articulatory theories. Recently, an increasing number of studies demonstrated the relationship between prosody and reading and, more specifically, the potential key role of suprasegmental phonology in the healthy development of phonological representations. The aim of this study is to explore part of prosodic features in dyslexics and normal developing children in reading and narration tasks, in French. We examined reading accuracy, reading rate, pauses frequency and duration, inter-pausal units (IPUs) duration and instantaneous variations of F0. Results show correct decoding skills for all subjects but a lack of automation of this procedure for dyslexics. Differences in pauses frequency and duration, IPUS duration and F0 variations observed between dyslexics and controls confirm the link between prosodic reading and automaticity. The longer pause duration in narrative form a temporal feature of dyslexic's production. This temporal characteristic reflects the cognitive cost done by a speech generation task involving lexical selection, syntactic planning and articulatory programming processes. This result is a first step towards evidence of a suprasegmental phonological deficit in spoken language that could be an early marker of later reading difficulties.

La modelisation des tests evaluant les troubles de la produc­tion de la parole pathologique (TPPP) en rapport avec la classification international du fonctionnement implique une reflexion sur les outils de mesure. L'acces au sens du message entre le decodage du signal et l'action qu'il induit chez l'interlocuteur justifie differentes methodes. L'objectif de ce travail est de demontrer la limite des tests d'intelligibilite habituelles. Materiel et methode : une population de 10 sujets presentant un TPPP secondaire au traitement d'un cancers des voies aerodigestives et 2 sujets controles ont enregistre un corpus de 80 syllabes elabores avec les 16 consonnes les plus frequentes du francais et 5 voyelles. Le test d'intelligibilite a consiste en une tache d'identification des consonnes par un jury de 11 auditeurs. Resultats : quelque soit la methode utilisee pour evaluer la valeur informative des consonnes testes, la consonne uvulaire /r/ et les nasales /n/,/m/ sont tres bien percues. La ponderation par le taux de confusion fait basculer la position des labiodentales /f/, /v/ et celle du /p/. La perception juste du son /p/ serait sous-estimee alors que celle des sons /v/ et /f/ serait surestimee. Les sons /g/, /k/, /j/ restent les moins bien percus. Cette observation resulte probablement du profil de distorsions produit par la selection de la population et probablement de la frequence des syllabes contenant ces consonnes dans la langue francaise pour l'echantillon de notre corpus. Conclusion : la prise en compte du taux de confusion apparait comme un element fondamental, incitant a rechercher des methodes d'analyse plus pertinentes des resultats des tests d'intelligibilite.

UNLABELLED:The modelling of the tests assessing speech disorders in touch with the international classification of the functioning implies a reflection on measurement tools. The access to the sense of the message from decoding of the signal to the action infers at the interlocutor's justifies various methods. The objective of this work is to demonstrate the limit of the usual tests of intelligibility.MATERIAL AND METHOD:A population of 10 subjects presenting a speech disorder secondary to a Head and Neck cancer and 2 subjects controls recorded a corpus of 80 syllables developed with the most frequent 16 French consonants and 5 vowels. The test of intelligibility consisted of a task of identification of consonants by a jury of 11 listeners.RESULTS:About is the method used to estimate the informative value of the consonants tested, the uvular consonant /r/ and the nasal In/, /m/ are very well perceived. The weighting by the rate of confusion makes tipped over the position of labiodentales If/, /v/ and that of / p/. The just perception of the sound/p/ would be underestimated while sounds /v/ and /f/ would be overestimated. Sounds /g/, /k/, /j/ remain the least well received. This observation results probably from the profile of distortions produced by the selection of the population and probably from the frequency of the syllables containing these consonants in the french language for the sample of the corpus.CONCLUSION:The rate of confusion appears as a fundamental element, inciting to look for more relevant methods of analysis of the results of the tests of intelligibility.