Kember Heather, Connaghan Kathryn, Patel Rupal
The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Australia.
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2017 Jul;52(4):469-478. doi: 10.1111/1460-6984.12285. Epub 2016 Nov 27.
Although tongue twisters have been widely use to study speech production in healthy speakers, few studies have employed this methodology for individuals with speech impairment. The present study compared tongue twister errors produced by adults with dysarthria and age-matched healthy controls. Eight speakers (four female, four male; mean age = 54.5 years) with spastic (mixed-spastic) dysarthria of varying aetiology (cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, multiple system atrophy) and eight controls (four female, four male; mean age = 56.9 years) were audio-recorded producing tongue twisters. One word in each tongue twister was marked for prominence. Speakers with dysarthria produced significantly more errors and spoke slower than healthy controls. The effect of prominence was significant for both groups-words spoken with prosodic prominence were significantly less error prone compared with words without prominence. While both groups produced most errors on words in the third position (of four-word utterances), speakers with dysarthria also produced high rates of errors on the first and fourth words. This preliminary investigation demonstrated the promise of applying the tongue twister paradigm to speakers with dysarthria and contributes to the evidence base for the implementation of prosodic strategies in speech intervention.
尽管绕口令已被广泛用于研究健康人群的言语产生，但很少有研究将这种方法应用于有言语障碍的个体。本研究比较了患有构音障碍的成年人与年龄匹配的健康对照组产生的绕口令错误。对八名患有不同病因（脑瘫、多发性硬化症、多系统萎缩）的痉挛性（混合型痉挛性）构音障碍患者（四名女性，四名男性；平均年龄 = 54.5岁）和八名对照组（四名女性，四名男性；平均年龄 = 56.9岁）进行了录制，记录他们说绕口令的情况。每个绕口令中的一个单词被标记为突出显示。与健康对照组相比，构音障碍患者产生的错误明显更多，语速也更慢。突出显示对两组都有显著影响——与没有突出显示的单词相比，有韵律突出显示的单词出错的可能性明显更小。虽然两组在四字语句的第三个位置的单词上产生的错误最多，但构音障碍患者在第一个和第四个单词上也产生了较高的错误率。这项初步调查证明了将绕口令范式应用于构音障碍患者的前景，并为在言语干预中实施韵律策略的证据基础做出了贡献。
