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Parkinsonian Speech And Voice Quality: Assessment And Improvement, Amr Gaballah

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease. Statistics show that nearly 90% of people impaired with PD develop voice and speech disorders. Speech production impairments in PD subjects typically result in hypophonia and consequently, poor speech signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in noisy environments and inferior speech intelligibility and quality. Assessment, monitoring, and improvement of the perceived quality and intelligibility of Parkinsonian voice and speech are, therefore, paramount. In the first study of this thesis, the perceived quality of sustained vowels produced by PD patients was assessed through objective predictors. Subjective quality ratings of sustained vowels were collected from …