Reduced Syntactic Complexity in Ataxic Dysarthria as a Reflection of Motor Speech Impairment

Esver, Melanie Elizabeth

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Reduced Syntactic Complexity in Ataxic Dysarthria as a Reflection of Motor Speech Impairment Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/sx61dp00m

Abstract

The impact of motor speech impairment on linguistic output is not clearly understood; however, changes in expressive language due to either compensatory behavior or underlying neurological cerebellar contributions in dysarthria may impact communicative effectiveness. This study aimed to investigate the syntactic complexity of spoken language produced by individuals with ataxic dysarthria (AD) and determine whether there was a reduction due to compensatory speech patterns. Speech samples were elicited with a picture description task for 26 individuals with ataxic dysarthria and 28 age and sex-matched controls. Two speech samples were chosen at random for each participant and categorized by presence/absence of dependent clauses. Parts of speech were determined and noted using a custom Python script. By establishing a syntactic complexity scoring system, 52 utterances from speakers with ataxia were scored and compared to 56 spoken utterances of age- and sex-matched controls. Overall, we found a significant difference in syntactic complexity of utterances produced by the two groups. However, within the ataxic dysarthria group, there were no significant differences in performance related to severity of the motor speech impairment. These findings demonstrate that syntactic complexity reduction could be an inherent feature of ataxic dysarthria, or it may serve as a compensatory strategy to reduce the frequency of articulatory breakdowns and mitigate the impact of prosodic abnormalities. More research must be conducted to determine its function.

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