Vowel Articulation Dynamic Stability Related to Parkinson’s Disease Rating Features: Male Dataset

Neurodegenerative pathologies as Parkinson’s Disease (PD) show important distortions in speech, affecting fluency, prosody, articulation and phonation. Classically, measurements based on articulation gestures altering formant positions, as the Vocal Space Area (VSA) or the Formant Centralization Ratio (FCR) have been proposed to measure speech distortion, but these markers are based mainly on static positions of sustained vowels. The present study introduces a measurement based on the mutual information distance among probability density functions of kinematic correlates derived from formant dynamics. An absolute kinematic velocity associated to the position of the jaw and tongue articulation gestures is estimated and modeled statistically. The distribution of this feature may differentiate PD patients from normative speakers during sustained vowel emission. The study is based on a limited database of 53 male PD patients, contrasted to a very selected and stable set of eight normative speakers. In this sense, distances based on Kullback–Leibler divergence seem to be sensitive to PD articulation instability. Correlation studies show statistically relevant relationship between information contents based on articulation instability to certain motor and nonmotor clinical scores, such as freezing of gait, or sleep disorders. Remarkably, one of the statistically relevant correlations point out to the time interval passed since the first diagnostic. These results stress the need of defining scoring scales specifically designed for speech disability estimation and monitoring methodologies in degenerative diseases of neuromotor origin.