Characterization and Quantification of Motor Speech Disorders in Huntington's Disease: Identification of Acoustic Markers

Huntington's disease (HD) is a neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system, of genetic etiology. It manifests itself in motor, cognitive and psychiatric disorders, which progressively worsen until the patient is grabbed. Motor speech performance disorders are present from the early stage of the disease. These difficulties, which progressively worsen until the end of the patient's life, lead to a communication disorder and constitute a major handicap with social withdrawal, loss of self-esteem and isolation, which are always very painfully experienced by patients and their entourage. Dysarthria in the HD has been very little studied, which makes its speech therapy uncodified. According to the most widely used classification by speech therapists and neurologists, the Darley classification (1975), the speech disorders observed in the HD are included in the heterogeneous group of hyperkinetic dysarthria, whose contours and properties are ill-defined. In this context, a more precise knowledge of speech disorders in the HD appears necessary to identify and characterize the different types of dysarthria and the dysfunctions associated with each level of production (respiration, phonation, resonance, articulation, prosody) and thus improve speech language therapy.

The investigators propose to use an acoustic evaluation to support the perceptual evaluation, available in the MonPaGe protocol, to describe the fine characteristics of the speech disorders in the HD and to define objective markers of dysarthria in this disease for francophone patients.

Each patient is seen in the framework of his annual follow-up consultation in the Competence Center mdH of Bordeaux University Hospital or in the Reference Center mdH of the hospital Henri Mondor of Créteil, for an evaluation of his speech with the computerized tool MonPaGe. A first speech evaluation with the BECD (Auzou, 2006) during 30 minutes is proposed to exclude very severe dysarthria. At the end of this rapid test subtest, the subjects who obtain a perceptive score <16 are offered the complete assesment of the MonPaGe computerized protocol (30 minutes).The application records directly and anonymously stores speech productions made by the patient.The productions are transmitted to the Phonetics and Phonology Laboratory of Paris (UMR 7018 CNRS / Sorbonne Nouvelle), via a secure large data exchange server and are subject to a perceptual and acoustic evaluation a posteriori.