Blurb:

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of dysarthria on speech characteristics in Greek with particular emphasis on the signaling of lexical stress, through perceptual and acoustic analyses. Apart from the realization of lexical stress, other possibly deviant speech characteristics were examined, including voice quality, consonant production and vowel production. A case study approach was used; data were collected from three Greek individuals with dysarthria and normal speakers that served as controls. The data primarily included isolated word production as well as vowel prolongation and syllable repetition tasks. The single word data were used for the acoustic analysis of lexical stress and for the stress identification task, both of which are described in detail in the following sections. Connected speech recordings, including sentence repetition and passage reading were also made as part of the initial assessment of the overall perceptual speech characteristics of the participants with dysarthria.