Acoustic prominence production in Parkinson's disease when there is a shared communicative goal

This study quantified the acoustic characteristics of prominence in people with Parkinson's disease (PD) when engaging in a communicatively driven task in which they read aloud instructions to a partner. Twelve people with PD and 14 controls read aloud instructions to a researcher in a simple communicative barrier game. Stimuli were designed to manipulate prominence on a target word that contrasted with a minimal pair that differed in the onset consonant. Outcomes included acoustic measures of prominence as a function of group and prominence condition. Overall, people with PD manipulated prominent words in similar ways to controls with respect to speech intensity and duration. An attenuated use of f0 was found in the PD group to differentiate prominent and non-prominent words. Group differences, but not differences in prominence marking, were found for vowel formants. Results indicate that, overall, prominence marking is relatively preserved in people with PD in communicative settings, though how prominence is conveyed varies to some degree compared to neurologically healthy talkers.