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Semin Speech Lang 2025; 46(01): 004-013
DOI: 10.1055/s-0044-1788767
Adult Research Article

Congruency and Emotional Valence Effects on Speech Production in Individuals with Parkinson's Disease

Karen Hebert
1   Department of Occupational Therapy, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota
,
Ji Sook Ahn
2   Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Seton Hall University, Nutley, New Jersey
,
Hooman Azmi
3   Department of Neurology, Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, Nutley, New Jersey
,
Manisha Parulekar
3   Department of Neurology, Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, Nutley, New Jersey
,
Sona Patel
2   Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Seton Hall University, Nutley, New Jersey
› Author Affiliations Funding This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; National Institutes of Health and National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, [grant number R03DC0013883].
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Abstract

Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) exhibit a variety of impairments in nonmotor symptoms including emotional processing and cognitive control that have implications for speech production. The present study sought to investigate whether impairments in cognitive processing in individuals with PD impact emotional sentence production as indicated by changes in speech rate. Thirty-six individuals (20 individuals with PD, 16 healthy controls) completed subtests 8A and 8B of the Florida Emotional Expressive Battery (FEEB) to elicit speech samples in five different emotional tones (happy, sad, angry, fear, and neutral). Sentences contained either semantically emotional or neutral information, resulting in conditions of congruency (same semantics-tone) and incongruency (different semantics-tone). Speech rate was impacted by the emotional tone of all participants. Individuals with PD demonstrated faster speech rates under conditions of conflicting semantic information than healthy older adults. Changes in speech rate under emotional conditions were not influenced by global measures of cognition or depression. The results of this study indicate that individuals with PD struggle to manage irrelevant information present during emotional speech production. Speech rate is a simple, easy-to-measure metric that may reflect cognitive processing impairments in PD.

Keywords

cognitive control - prosody - emotional tone - Parkinson's disease - speech rate


Publication History

Article published online:
31 July 2024

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