Project Details
Description
Apraxia of speech (AOS) is an adult, acquired speech sound disorder that disrupts speech articulation and intelligibility, thus causing functional disability. As AOS is an early, frequent, and often only symptom of early-onset dementias, early diagnosis is crucial. Currently, diagnosis is based on expert perceptual judgment of the presence of speech behaviours such as segregating syllables, prolonging or distorting speech sounds, and reduced fluency, that arise from the inability to coordinate articulation – the overlapping articulatory gestures of lips, tongue, and soft palate, required to achieve fluent speech. However, expert perceptual measures merely infer abnormalities in the underlying articulation and are known to be inconsistent, resulting in over/underdiagnosis. A significant barrier to progressing the field to an objective diagnostic marker or protocol has been the inability to clearly view movement of
the tongue during speech and the relative movement across multiple oral articulators simultaneously. Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) has recently overcome this barrier; however, rtMRI has only been used to study one patient with AOS. We will (1) characterise impaired articulation in AOS using rtMRI and acoustic data; (2) examine how key articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual characteristics of speech, and the foci of cortical atrophy contribute to existing AOS diagnosis (3) identify which articulatory markers can be inferred through perception and which markers cannot. Our work will provide further information on the inability to articulate in AOS by overcoming the barriers of the invisibility of articulation, and address issues in perceptual judgements by linking impaired articulation to clinicians’ perception. The outcomes of this work are a fundamental explanatory account of the speech error patterns of AOS and a set of articulatory markers that can be identified using perceptual methods and inform targets for behavioural intervention.
the tongue during speech and the relative movement across multiple oral articulators simultaneously. Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) has recently overcome this barrier; however, rtMRI has only been used to study one patient with AOS. We will (1) characterise impaired articulation in AOS using rtMRI and acoustic data; (2) examine how key articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual characteristics of speech, and the foci of cortical atrophy contribute to existing AOS diagnosis (3) identify which articulatory markers can be inferred through perception and which markers cannot. Our work will provide further information on the inability to articulate in AOS by overcoming the barriers of the invisibility of articulation, and address issues in perceptual judgements by linking impaired articulation to clinicians’ perception. The outcomes of this work are a fundamental explanatory account of the speech error patterns of AOS and a set of articulatory markers that can be identified using perceptual methods and inform targets for behavioural intervention.
| Acronym | ID24 (Usyd led) |
|---|---|
| Status | Active |
| Effective start/end date | 1/01/25 → 31/12/28 |