| چکیده انگلیسی مقاله |
Introduction: Idiopathic Parkinson is an age-related, common progressive neurodegenerative disease whose probable causes are yet unknown. Also, it is not yet clears whether specific language disturbances form part of Parkinson’s disease (PD) cognitive profile. This disease leaves several impacts on the speech of its patients; many of such impacts have not undergone a serious study in different languages. Methods and materials: The ultimate goal of this article is provision of the prosodic features of Persian – speaking Parkinsonian patients, using 4 major tasks to evaluate their production and perception impairments. The tasks include "spontaneous speech", "fluency task (DDK)","production and perception of emotional prosody", and "production of high-low vs. low-high vowels". In order to carry out this research, the above-mentioned tasks were administered to 5 non-demented patients with idiopathic Parkinson and 5 healthy people, as the control group, and the results were compared and analysed. Results: The results share the idea with the previous findings which indicated that these patients show greater deficiencies in language production. Especially they appear to have difficulties in producing emotional prosody as well as the production of low-high vowels. The findings of this research also reveal that such patients do not have much difficulty in perception of emotional prosody, which is in contrast with some previous findings such as that of Breitenstein et al. (2001), Davis Garret et al.(2002) and Harel et al.(2004). Conclusion: This research concludes that the patients seem to have impairments in concentration during all stages. i.e., their cognitive abilities are mostly impaired due to their lack of selective attention.Based on the results of this research, it is inferred that some specific speech defects are common in moderate and advanced PD patients, including disturbances of respiration, phonation and articulation. Vocal tremor was identified on narrow band spectrogram for 2 subjects in early moderate and late moderate stage. Keyword: PARKINSON’S DISEASE (PD), PROSODIC FEATURES, EMOTIONAL PROSODY, SPONTANEOUS SPEECH, FLUENCY TASK (DDK) |
