Between economy of effort and speech accuracy in hypokinetic dysarthria

Abstract

This paper aims at observing if dysarthric speakers affected by Parkinson’s disease maintain phonological distinctions (/s/ vs. /t/) and sociophonetic features ([t^h]), since they both require a precise control of fine gestures though have a different impact on communication.Acoustic data collected on speech corpora representing different speech styles were analysed with regard to the duration of consonants and to the COG in fricatives as well as in the VOT interval identified in plosives. Results show that pathological speakers distinguish plosives from fricatives even though with an overall shorter duration in comparison with controls. Moreover, data suggest that aspiration as a sociolinguistic marker may be not preserved through compensatory strategies as much as the difference between phonologically relevant segments.