Purpose: The purposes of this study are to develop a novel multimodal framework for measuring variability at the muscular, kinematic, and acoustic levels of the motor speech hierarchy and evaluate the utility of this framework in detecting speech impairment in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Method: The myoelectric activities of three…

Purpose: Prior investigations suggest that simultaneous performance of more than 1 motor-oriented task may exacerbate speech motor deficits in individuals with Parkinson disease (PD). The purpose of the current investigation was to examine the extent to which performing a low-demand manual task affected the connected speech in individuals with and…

Background: Speech and language impairments are well-established in individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). However, knowledge about particular aspects of social communication and everyday conversational abilities is limited. Aims: To investigate self- and informant-report ratings of social communicative abilities in ALS participants…

Purpose: Measuring tongue deformation and internal muscle motion during speech has been a challenging task because the tongue deforms in 3 dimensions, contains interdigitated muscles, and is largely hidden within the vocal tract. In this article, a new method is proposed to analyze tagged and cine magnetic resonance images of the tongue during…

Purpose: Our purpose was to create a comprehensive review of speech impairment in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), primary progressive aphasia (PPA), and progressive apraxia of speech in order to identify the most effective measures for diagnosis and monitoring, and to elucidate associations between speech and neuroimaging. Method: Speech and…

Background: Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is a slowly progressive multi-systemic disease with an autosomal-dominant inheritance caused by a mutation on chromosome 19 (19q13.3). Aims: To explore speech characteristics in a group of individuals with the congenital and childhood-onset forms of DM1 in terms of intelligibility, speech-sound…

Purpose: Stuttering involves a breakdown in the speech motor system. We address whether stuttering in its early stage is specific to the speech motor system or whether its impact is observable across motor systems. Method: As an extension of Olander, Smith, and Zelaznik (2010), we measured bimanual motor timing performance in 115 children: 70…

Purpose: To evaluate whether a hypothesis suggesting that apraxia of speech results from phonological overspecification could be relevant for childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Method: High-density EEG was recorded from 5 children with CAS and 5 matched controls, ages 5-8 years, with and without CAS, as they listened to randomized sequences of CV…

Dysarthria following surgical resection of childhood posterior fossa tumour (PFT) is most commonly documented in a select group of participants with mutism in the acute recovery phase, thus limiting knowledge of post-operative prognosis for this population of children as a whole. Here we report on the speech characteristics of 13 cases seen…

This article analysed the acoustic structure of voiced stop ++ vowel sequences in a group of persons who stutter (PWS). This phonetic unit was chosen because successful production is highly dependent on the differential tweaking of right-to-left anticipatory coarticulation as a function of stop place. Thus, essential elements of both speech motor…

This investigation examined the visuomotor tracking abilities of persons with apraxia of speech (AOS) or conduction aphasia (CA). In addition, tracking performance was correlated with perceptual judgments of speech accuracy. Five individuals with AOS and four with CA served as participants, as well as an equal number of healthy controls matched by…

This exploratory study investigated sensory-motor mechanisms in five people who stutter (PWS) and five people who do not (PNS). Lip kinematic and coordination data were recorded as they produced bi-syllabic nonwords at two rates (normal and fast) in three conditions (jaw-free, immediately after insertion of a bite-block, and after a 10-min…

Apraxia of Speech (AOS) is an impairment of motor programming. However, the exact nature of this deficit remains unclear. The present study examined motor programming in AOS in the context of a recent two-stage model [Klapp, S. T. (1995). Motor response programming during simple and choice reaction time: The role of practice. "Journal of…

Jaw movement patterns were examined longitudinally in a 3-year-old male with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and compared with a typically developing control group. The child with CAS was followed for 8 months, until he began accurately and consistently producing the bilabial phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/. A movement tracking system was used to…

Apraxia of speech (AOS) is typically described as a motor-speech disorder with clinically well-defined symptoms, but without a clear understanding of the underlying problems in motor control. A number of studies have compared the speech of subjects with AOS to the fluent speech of controls, but only a few have included speech movement data and if…