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Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) exhibit a variety of impairments in nonmotor symptoms including emotional processing and cognitive control that have implications for speech production. The present study sought to investigate whether impairments in cognitive processing in individuals with PD impact emotional sentence production as indicated by changes in speech rate. Thirty-six individuals (20 individuals with PD, 16 healthy controls) completed subtests 8A and 8B of the Florida Emotional Expressive Battery (FEEB) to elicit speech samples in five different emotional tones (happy, sad, angry, fear, and neutral). Sentences contained either semantically emotional or neutral information, resulting in conditions of congruency (same semantics-tone) and incongruency (different semantics-tone). Speech rate was impacted by the emotional tone of all participants. Individuals with PD demonstrated faster speech rates under conditions of conflicting semantic information than healthy older adults. Changes in speech rate under emotional conditions were not influenced by global measures of cognition or depression. The results of this study indicate that individuals with PD struggle to manage irrelevant information present during emotional speech production. Speech rate is a simple, easy-to-measure metric that may reflect cognitive processing impairments in PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives/hypothesis: Speech rate is deemed as one of the contributing factors in dysphonia. This study sought out if dysphonic patients speak faster than their normal counterparts. Also, the effects of dysphonia subtype (organic, functional, and neurologic), sex, and age on speech rate were investigated., Study Design: An analytical cross-sectional study., Methods: Reading and connected speech samples of 188 participants (128 dysphonic patients and 60 normal controls) were transcribed and their speech rates while eliminating the voiceless parts and pauses by freeware Praat were calculated in syllable/word per minute., Results: The results indicated that dysphonic patients significantly speak faster than normal controls in connected speech with moderate to large strength of effect size (P < 0.05) and this pattern was mostly not affected by sex. The speech rate did not differ significantly between subgroups of dysphonic patients (P > 0.05), except for speech rate in connected speech and average speech rate of reading and connected speech tasks between organic, functional, and neurological dysphonic patients with normal controls (P < 0.05). Also, there was no correlation between speech rate and age (P > 0.05)., Conclusions: According to the preliminary outcomes, the increased rate of speech may be a contributing factor to dysphonia. Additional research is required to clarify the role of speech rate in clinical settings., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors have no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)