Lynda Feenaughty

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Memphis

Purpose Previous research has revealed considerable variation in speech rates among English speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) with slower, faster, or similar rates than controls. The purpose of this study was to characterize speech rates of Mandarin speakers with PD and the corresponding articulation and pause characteristics explaining the sp...

Purpose This cross-sectional observational pilot study investigated egocentric social networks for 10 paired sex- and age-matched adults with and without multiple sclerosis (MS). This study also investigated the relationship between social network measures and various disease factors associated with MS. The relationship between social network measu...

Background Cognitive-linguistic deficits are a concern in multiple sclerosis (MS). Thus, clinical management requires knowledge of how impaired cognition associated with MS impacts language performance during everyday communication tasks. Aims This study investigated language performance in narrative monologues produced by individuals with MS comp...

Background Although extant dual-task studies suggest cognitive-motor interference may magnify existing non-speech motor impairments in multiple sclerosis (MS), cognitive-speech motor interference in MS has not been studied. This study evaluated the presence of cognitive-speech motor interference in MS and explored within subject differences in spee...

Background Prior speech entrainment studies, where individuals with non-fluent aphasia mimic an audio-visual model, suggest speech entrainment improves speech fluency, as indexed by various linguistic measures (e.g., the total number of different words produced per minute). Here, more precise speech timing adjustments accompanying entrained speech...

Objective To investigate the impact of cognitive impairment on spoken language produced by speakers with multiple sclerosis (MS) with and without dysarthria. Method Sixty speakers comprised operationally defined groups. Speakers produced a spontaneous speech sample to obtain speech timing measures of speech rate, articulation rate, and silent paus...

Diminished vocalic segments indexed by the extent, duration, and rate of change in the second formant (F2) are common in dysarthria and are known to reduce intelligibility in adults with multiple sclerosis (MS; Hartelius et al., 2010). When F2 range was measured over select sentences from a reading passage, results indicated that the F2 range may n...

Paraspeech tasks are frequently incorporated in motor speech disorder assessments and include syllable diadochokinesis (DDK), the rapid repetition of alternating movements (Kent, 2015). DDK measures indicate movements of the oral articulators and may detect problems before specific functions such as speech are affected in neurodegenerative diseases...

Purpose Dysarthria is a consequence of multiple sclerosis (MS) that can co-occur with cognitive impairment. Clinical management thus requires understanding the separate and combined effects of dysarthria and cognitive impairment on functional communication in MS. This study compared perceptual measures of intelligibility and speech severity that ca...

Many stroke survivors with aphasia in the acute period experience spontaneous recovery within the first six months after the stroke. However, approximately 30-40% sustain permanent aphasia and the factors determining incomplete recovery are unclear. Suboptimal recovery may be influenced by disruption of areas seemingly spared by the stroke due to l...

Purpose Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a consequence of stroke that frequently co-occurs with aphasia. Its study is limited by difficulties with its perceptual evaluation and dissociation from co-occurring impairments. This study examined the classification accuracy of several acoustic measures for the differential diagnosis of AOS in a sample of strok...

Efference copy is a cognitive mechanism argued to be critical for initiating and monitoring speech: however, the extent to which breakdown of efference copy mechanisms impact speech production is unclear. This study examined the best mechanistic predictors of non-fluent speech among 88 stroke survivors. Objective speech fluency measures were subjec...

Introduction: Many stroke survivors who suffer from aphasia in the acute period experience spontaneous recovery within the first six months post-stroke. About 20% sustain permanent and disabling language problems and the factors that drive incomplete recovery are not clear. Cortical dysfunction may occur in areas seemingly spared by the stroke due...

Using lesion-based analysis to examine discourse parameters in chronic stroke.

Conference Abstract: Differentiating speech production errors that can be attributed to higher-level phoneme selection (phonemic paraphasias) from lower-level motor planning/programming impairments (i.e., articulation errors that occur in apraxia of speech, AOS) remains a challenge. Relating speech production errors that characterize AOS to associa...

Predicting speech entrainment success using white matter connectivity

Abstract This study investigated the acoustic basis of within-speaker, across-utterance variation in sentence intelligibility for 12 speakers with dysarthria secondary to Parkinson's disease (PD). Acoustic measures were also obtained for 12 healthy controls for comparison to speakers with PD. Speakers read sentences using their typical speech style...

This preliminary study investigated how cognitive-linguistic status in multiple sclerosis (MS) is reflected in two speech tasks (i.e. oral reading, narrative) that differ in cognitive-linguistic demand. Twenty individuals with MS were selected to comprise High and Low performance groups based on clinical tests of executive function and information...

We examined cognitive predictors of speech and articulation rate in 50 individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) and 23 healthy controls. We measured speech and articulation rate from audio-recordings of participants reading aloud and talking extemporaneously on a topic of their choice (i.e., self-generated speech). Articulation rate was calculated...

Purpose: Language sampling is an important technique that speech-language pathologists use to gather and analyze a child's language abilities. The current study examines the effects of student training on the quality of child language samples obtained by undergraduate speech-language pathology students. Method: A pretest–posttest, within-subjects d...