Ritmo e malattia di Parkinson. Prime riflessioni sull’annotazione automatica del parlato di pazienti in stadi iniziali.

Speech disorders resulting from Parkinson’s disease (PD), typically classified as hypokinetic dysarthria, include the alteration of speech rhythm, even at the very onset of the disease. The purpose of this study is to test an automatic annotation procedure for the calculation of two rhythmic variables – %V, vowel percentage, and VtoV, the mean interval between two consecutive vowel onset points – on a corpus of read speech collected from 20 patients with early-stage PD and from 20 healthy controls, sex-matched and similar age. The results of the automatic procedure, compared to those previously obtained with the manual labelling, were found to be effective in the characterization of PD speech rhythm, with significantly higher values of %V in patients’ productions than in healthy control speech. Some critical issues are discussed in details.