Contribution of acoustic analysis to the detection of vocoid epenthesis in apraxia of speech and other motor speech disorders.
Marion Bourqui, Michaela Pernon, Cécile Fougeron and 1 others
PMID 35720256WHAT IT FOUND
Acoustic analysis found extra vowel sounds in consonant clusters that speech therapists missed by ear.
These insertions appeared mostly in apraxia of speech, but not in every case, so they cannot diagnose it alone.
Key findings
01Acoustic analysis found vocoid epenthesis in 3 of 10 participants with apraxia of speech and in one participant with Wilson's disease, with none in the Parkinson's disease, ALS, or control groups.
02In the focused listening test, six speech-language therapists identified acoustically visible vocoid insertions with 77% accuracy, and none reached 100%.
03Vocoid epenthesis was neither systematic in apraxia of speech nor exclusive to it, because not all participants with apraxia of speech produced insertions and one participant with Wilson's disease did.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The sample was small: each disorder group had only 10 participants, and only 3 participants with apraxia of speech produced insertions. Only voiceless consonant clusters were analysed, and only 14 pseudo-word items were used, so insertions in other cluster types may have been missed. The listening test used a selected corpus of 59 pseudo-words created after the acoustic analysis, not a fresh clinical sample of unknown diagnoses. The therapists judged recorded pseudo-words online and could re-listen, which is easier than live clinical scoring. The participants were French native speakers, so the pseudo-word set and cluster patterns may not transfer directly to other languages. The study did not test whether acoustic vocoid detection changes real clinical diagnosis, because diagnostic groups were already established.
Declared interests
The work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation Sinergia program.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat vocoid epenthesis as a stand-alone sign of apraxia of speech. Acoustic analysis found insertions in only 3 of 10 participants with apraxia of speech and in one participant with Wilson's disease, so it was neither systematic nor exclusive.