Determining the speech profile of speakers with Primary Progressive Aphasia
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1
Johns Hopkins Medicine, United States
Background. Although there have been several recent studies and clinical observations showing that individuals that belong to different Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) variants differ in their speech production (Ballard et al. 2014, Caso et al. 2014), little is known about how individuals with different PPA variants differ with respect to the acoustic details of speech production. To this end, in this paper, we evaluate the following question: How do the segmental, prosodic, voice quality, and fluency properties of speech differ in individuals with lvPPA, nfvPPA, and svPPA? To answer this question, we provide a novel combination of measurements of the speech profile of PPA individuals.
Methodology. Participants were 51 individuals with PPA: 19 participants were subtyped as logopenic PPA, 14 as semantic PPA, 18 were subtyped as non-fluent PPA. Participants were recorded in picture description tasks by trained clinicians. We propose a set of acoustic measures that can capture different dimensions of speech productions (see Figure 1), related to vowels (vowel formants, F1…F5, vowel duration); prosody (fundamental frequency, pause duration and pause rate); voice quality (harmonics, amplitudes, and the differences between harmonics and amplitudes (H1-H2, H1-A1, H1-A3), Cepstral Peak Prominence, Hammarberg Index, energy bands information, shimmering, jittering, and Harmonics to Noise Ratio); and speech fluency (overall speech time, speech rate and articulation rate). For the statistical analysis, we employed linear mixed effects models using the variant and the language severity as fixed factors. Gender and vowel were selected as random slopes (see also the results section for more details).
Results. There were significant differences between the variants in the characteristics related to vowel formants, vowel duration, voice quality, and speech fluency. Overall effects such as slow speech resulted in longer duration for vowels (see Figure 2), longer pauses, slower fluency metrics in nfvPPA. PPA variants differ in the melodic patterns of speech production. LvPPA individuals display low F0 in the minimum F0 measures and a very small F0 range whereas svPPA follow by producing higher F0 than lvPPA individuals (see Figure 3). By, contrast nfvPPA associates with higher F0 values. With respect to fluency, nfvPPA are characterized by slower speech/articulation rate, followed by the lvPPA group. We found significant effects of PPA individuals on voice quality measures.
Conclusions. As PPA affects both language and speech mechanisms involved in language production, individuals with different PPA variants produce speech signals with distinct and measurable acoustic properties. The study of speech production can quantify the underlying speech characteristics of PPA, facilitate diagnosis and suptyping of variants, and inform evaluation, patient care, family and treatment planning.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the participants in this project and for the support from the Science of Learning Institute at Johns Hopkins University to KT and NIH/NIDCD R01 DC014475.
References
Ballard, K. J., Savage, S., Leyton, C. E., Vogel, A. P., Hornberger, M., & Hodges, J. R. (2014). Logopenic and nonfluent variants of primary progressive aphasia are differentiated by acoustic measures of speech production. PLoS ONE, 9(2), e89864.
Caso, F., Mandelli, M. L., Henry, M., Gesierich, B., Bettcher, B. M., Ogar, J., . . . Gorno-Tempini, M. L. (2014). In vivo signatures of nonfluent/agrammatic primary progressive aphasia caused by FTLD pathology. Neurology, 82(3), 239-247. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24353332
Gorno-Tempini, M. L., Hillis, A. E., Weintraub, S., Kertesz, A., Mendez, M., Cappa, S. F., . . . Grossman, M. (2011). Classification of primary progressive aphasia and its variants. Neurology, 76(11), 1006--1014.
Keywords:
primary progressive aphasia,
Prosody,
fluency,
Vowels and consonants,
Voice Quality
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting, Macau, Macao, SAR China, 27 Oct - 29 Oct, 2019.
Presentation Type:
Platform presentation
Topic:
Not eligible for student award
Citation:
Themistocleous
C,
Ficek
B and
Tsapkini
K
(2019). Determining the speech profile of speakers with Primary Progressive Aphasia.
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00022
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Received:
07 May 2019;
Published Online:
09 Oct 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Charalambos Themistocleous, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, United States, charalampos.themistokleous@isp.uio.no