Final lengthening in Parkinsonian French Speech: Effects of position in phrase on the duration of CV syllables and speech segments

Abstract

This study had two objectives. The first was to analyse the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) on the duration of CV syllables and their components in different positions within phrases in French; the second was to examine the distribution of final lengthening (FL) on syllable sub-components. Two main tendencies emerged: (1) PD patients produced normal FL, and (2) FL influenced vowels more than consonants. These findings suggest that PD speakers had no difficulty with FL and that there is a progressive lengthening across the sub-constituents of the final syllable. More fundamentally, these results indicate that the syntactic function of prosody is intact in PD patients, at least during the early and mild stages of the disease.

Keywords:

• Final lengthening
• duration of syllables consonants and vowels
• Parkinson's disease
• read speech
• French

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and to Anthony Scrimgeour for style improvement. The research was funded by the ANR blanc08 1_313070 DESPHO_APADY (French National Research Agency) and PHRC 2003 and France Parksinson Association.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.