Quantitative Analysis of Vocal Tract Resonances in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is often associated with hypokinetic dysarthria, impacting speech-motor function and resulting in articulatory deficits such as reduced speech intelligibility due to stiffness in articulatory structures. This study aims to introduce novel speech metrics to assess articulation impairments and differentiate between healthy individuals and those with PD. Resonant frequency attenuation (RFA) was confirmed as a valid measure, and two additional acoustic features based on supraglottic resonances were proposed. Their efficacy in distinguishing between groups was evaluated using a dataset comprising 19 healthy controls (HC) and 28 PD patients. Significantly divergent values between PD and HC were observed for all three features via Student’s t-test. Employing logistic regression with leave-one-out cross-validation, PD classification achieved 96% sensitivity and 100% specificity. This preliminary study suggests that supraglottic resonances could be pivotal in aiding PD diagnosis through acoustic speech analysis.