Quantitative analysis of intonation patterns produced by Cantonese speakers with Parkinson's disease: a preliminary study

This preliminary study aimed to apply the command-response model to the analysis of disrupted intonation patterns in speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Three Cantonese PD speakers with mild prosodic impairment participated. The speech stimuli were 36 utterances (questions and statements). Productions were analyzed using the model parameters (base frequency, magnitude and onset time of each phrase command, and amplitude and duration of each tone command). The results showed that Cantonese PD speakers marked the question-statement contrast only by adding a question boundary tone command and contrasting the duration of the tone command at the final position, but not by differences in base frequency, as previously reported for nondysarthric speakers. This study showed promising results for using the command-response model to analyze intonation patterns in Cantonese dysarthric speech. Additional modelling issues for this group of speakers are discussed.