posted on 2019-07-15, 21:27authored byJason A. Whitfield, Zoe Kriegel, Adam M. Fullenkamp, Daryush D. Mehta
Purpose: Prior investigations suggest that simultaneous performance of more than 1 motor-oriented task may exacerbate speech motor deficits in individuals with Parkinson disease (PD). The purpose of the current investigation was to examine the extent to which performing a low-demand manual task affected the connected speech in individuals with and without PD.
Method: Individuals with PD and neurologically healthy controls performed speech tasks (reading and extemporaneous speech tasks) and an oscillatory manual task (a counterclockwise circle-drawing task) in isolation (single-task condition) and concurrently (dual-task condition).
Results: Relative to speech task performance, no changes in speech acoustics were observed for either group when the low-demand motor task was performed with the concurrent reading tasks. Speakers with PD exhibited a significant decrease in pause duration between the single-task (speech only) and dual-task conditions for the extemporaneous speech task, whereas control participants did not exhibit changes in any speech production variable between the single- and dual-task conditions.
Conclusions: Overall, there were little to no changes in speech production when a low-demand oscillatory motor task was performed with concurrent reading. For the extemporaneous task, however, individuals with PD exhibited significant changes when the speech and manual tasks were performed concurrently, a pattern that was not observed for control speakers.
Supplemental Material S1. Visual representation of the algorithm used to compute within- trial kinematic variation. The standard deviation of the radius was calculated by first computing the standard deviations of all cycle radii within the 10-degree windows, and then the standard deviations from each window were averaged to arrive at an aggregate variance metric.
Supplemental Material S2. Animation of 30 seconds of a manual movement trace produced by a control participant in the single-task condition (i.e., circling alone).
Supplemental Material S3. Animation of 30 seconds of a manual movement trace produced by a participant with Parkinson disease (PD) in the single-task condition (i.e., circling alone). Note: the Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) stage for this participant was 3.
Whitfield, J. A., Kriegel, Z., Fullenkamp, A. M., & Mehta, D. D. (2019). Effects of concurrent manual task performance on connected speech acoustics in individuals with Parkinson disease. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62, 2099–2117. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_JSLHR-S-MSC18-18-0190
Publisher Note: This article is part of the Forum: Selected Papers From the 2018 Conference on Motor Speech—Basic Science and Clinical Innovation.
Funding
Portions of this work were funded by grants from the Vice President for Research and Economic Engagement and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship at Bowling Green State University. The first author received an internal grant that supported the completion of this project.