Sports Related Concussion Impacts Speech Rate and Muscle Physiology

ABSTRACT

Objective

Establish objective and subjective speech rate and muscle function differences between athletes with and without sports related concussion (SRC) histories and provide potential motor speech evaluation in SRC.

Methods

Over 1,110 speech samples were obtained from 30, 19–22 year-old athletes who had sustained an SRC within the past 2 years and 30 pair-wise matched control athletes with no history of SRC. Speech rate was measured via average time per syllable, average unvoiced time per syllable, and expert perceptual judgment. Speech muscle function was measured via surface electromyography over the obicularis oris, masseter, and segmental triangle. Group differences were assessed using MANOVA, bootstrapping and predictive ROC analyses.

Results

Athletes with SRC had slower speech rates during DDK tasks than controls as evidenced by longer average time per syllable longer average unvoiced time per syllable and expert judgment of slowed rate. Rate measures were predictive of concussion history. Further, athletes with SRC required more speech muscle activation than controls to complete DDK tasks.

Conclusion

Clear evidence of slowed speech and increased muscle activation during the completion of DDK tasks in athletes with SRC histories relative to controls. Future work should examine speech rate in acute concussion.

KEYWORDS:

• Sports related concussion (SRC)
• motor speech
• motor control
• sEMG

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the members of the XXX and especially XXX statistical consultation.

Disclosure Statement

The authors have no competing or conflicts of interest to declare.

Data Availability

Data for this project is available from the primary author given reasonable request.

Ethics Approval

This Speech Analysis of Former Concussed Athletes study was approved by the institutional review board of human research projects at XXX and carried out in accordance with XXX standards of ethics.

What does this study add?

This study is the first of its kind to analyze speech timing and acoustic measures of athletes with and without SRC histories to demonstrate differences between groups.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation [New Century Scholarship]; National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [R01DC012315].