Dysarthria Assessments

Question 1

What are instrumental assessments for the phonatory subsystem?

Answer 1

Acoustic analysis: look at plosives on spectrogram, intonation analysis (F0 at onset and end of utterance), sound pressure level
Endoscopic Ax: visualization of VF
Aerodynamic Ax: use Phonatory 
Aerodynamic System (PAS) (measure of laryngeal resistance)

Question 2

What are perceptual evaluations for the phonatory subsystem?

Answer 2

Use Ax tasks such as non-speech (cough, laugh, coup), phonation (MPT, steady pitch, raising/lowering pitch), and sentence-level speech (plosives to assess laryngeal devoicing, assess prosody)

Question 3

What are instrumental assessments for respiratory subsystem?

Answer 3

Aerodynamic ax (measure subglottal pressure using intraoral air pressure in reps of /pa/ with PAS), u-tube + water bubble manometer, spirometer (vital capacity), dB SPL meter (vocal intensity)

Question 4

What are perceptual evaluations of the respiratory subsystem?

Answer 4

Observe effort/fatiguability in speech (trailing off?), breath group duration, pause duration, volume at initiation of speech, general loudness (reduced? variable?), breathing rate (shallow?), prosody, MPT (subglottal pressure when trying to count to 20 in 1 breath)

Question 5

What are instrumental assessments for the articulatory subsystem?

Answer 5

IOPI (measure max pressure when squeezing bulb, sustained force), bite blocks (assess tongue + lip mobility indep from jaw)

Question 6

What are perceptual evaluations for the articulatory subsystem?

Answer 6

Speech tasks (lips and jaw = bilabials and V, tongue front = linguals and V, tongue back = velars /k/ /g/ + back V, coordination/sequencing = PTK, multi-syllable and sentence level productions)

Question 7

What are instrumental assessments for the resonance subsystem?

Answer 7

Aerodynamic Ax: assesses oral pressure and nasal flow, identifies presence + degree of VP problem
Endoscopic Ax: view soft palate during speech tasks
Nasometric Ax: quantitative acoustic assessment of oral-nasal balance

Question 8

What are perceptual evaluations for resonance subsystem?

Answer 8

Observe for hyper/hyponasality, nasal emissions, using speech tasks (words, phrases, paragraphs with sibilants and high pressure sounds /m/ /p/ /b/ /t/ /d/ /ch/ /s/ /z/)

Question 9

What are instrumental assessments for the prosody subsystem?

Answer 9

Acoustic analysis to measure pitch(?)

Question 10

What are perceptual evaluations of prosody subsystem?

Answer 10

Have them read a passage, emphatic speech