Spasmodic dysphonia: introductory phonetic analyses

Adductor spasmodic dysphonia (ADSD) is a neurological dystonia characterised by involuntary adductor spasms of the larynx during speech. Spasm frequency is often reported to increase during syllables that begin with voiced speech sounds, especially glottal stops. Because of its underlying physical a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Clinical linguistics & phonetics Vol. ahead-of-print; no. ahead-of-print; pp. 1 - 16
Main Authors: Reid, Eric W., Nobriga, Christina V.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London Taylor & Francis 03-10-2023
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects:
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Adductor spasmodic dysphonia (ADSD) is a neurological dystonia characterised by involuntary adductor spasms of the larynx during speech. Spasm frequency is often reported to increase during syllables that begin with voiced speech sounds, especially glottal stops. Because of its underlying physical and acoustic complexities, the voicing contrast in American English (AE) appears unlikely to interact consistently with a singular physical phenomenon like laryngeal spasm. This retrospective study investigated additional phonetic contrasts and their relationship to spasm frequency. Standardised, 144-word recordings of 36 participants with adductor spasmodic dysphonia were analysed. Productions were coded for rater-perceived syllable stress, voiced/voiceless onset, vowel/consonant onset, and word-onset place and manner of production. Phonetic contexts were compared using independent sample t-tests and Kruskal-Wallis statistics. Contexts in which spasm varied significantly included stressed/unstressed syllables, content/function words, and multisyllabic/monosyllabic words. Study results reaffirm the clinical usefulness of standardised ADSD/ABSD sentences during differential diagnosis but conflict with previous studies that report a connection between ADSD spasm and phoneme voicing.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0269-9206
1464-5076
DOI:10.1080/02699206.2022.2096483