Funded Projects

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a disorder often characterized by its motor consequences: a shuffling gait, unsteady balance, and, in speech, poorer articulation, lower volume, and a voice with flat pitch. Consequently, many speech therapeutic approaches make addressing those motor consequences the primary target of both assessment and treatment. Undoubtedly, these are crucial issues for PD, but those approaches leave a potential additional focus of speech dysfunction unresolved: perception. Some studies have shown challenges in the perception of speech on the part of people with PD. People with PD show deficits compared to age-matched controls in their ability to distinguish vocal emotions, in their ability to adjust to perturbations in perceptual feedback, and, in some circumstances, in their perception of speech loudness and rate. In this project, we aim to assess possible contributors to this speech perceptual dysfunction in PD. For instance, people with PD have been observed to be challenged by the process of learning new information, particularly for tasks that require procedural learning (i.e., learning that can’t be easily verbalized, like riding a bike). If people with PD struggle with this in tasks related to language, it could explain some of the observed deficits in speech perception.