Background & Purpose: The neuroanatomy associated with strokes are the Basal ganglia and Middle cerebral artery. The Basal ganglia controls motors functions and voluntary motor movements, which also include motor speech control. Middle cerebral artery infarctions are caused by a lesion blocking an artery, therefore damaging the area of the brain that was supplied blood through the blocked artery. There isn’t a large amount of research on the neuroanatomical relation to speech characteristics caused by strokes. The Purpose of this study in delineate the Acoustic-perceptual characteristics in Basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhage and Middle cerebral artery infarction patients.
Methods: The test group subjects of this research were patients that were diagnosed with Basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhages and Middle cerebral artery infarctions due to a left brain hemisphere stroke. There were a total of 14 patients in this group with an average age of 54.21±8.39 years. 7 patients were Basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhage patients caused by lesions, and 7 patients were Middle cerebral artery infarction patients. The control group subjects of this research were a total of 14 adults with no particular oral and mouth structure related health problems. There were 7 adult males and 7 adult females and the average age of this group was 49.71±9.86 years. The collection of speech and analysis of acoustics was done using Praat (version 4.4.22), and the speech language material used were the VPI· speech articulation test words and the ‘Wind and Sun’ paragraph. For the Acoustic-perceptual characteristics analysis, the articulation evaluation was conducted by 3 speech therapists listening to and evaluating the articulation of 22 words and paragraphs.
Results: 1) Plosive, Affricates, Sibilance, the length of nasal consonants, the length of following vowels, and the total enunciation time of words in both the Basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhage and Middle cerebral artery infarction patient groups were longer relative to the articulation evaluation of the control group patients.
2) The VOT of the leading Plosive in Basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhage patients, Middle cerebral artery infarction patient groups and the control group patients showed a meaningful difference in the bilabial fortis consonants and aspirated consonants, alveolar fortis consonants, and velar fortis consonants and aspirated consonants.
3) The frictional frequencies of the sibilance lax consonants and aspirated consonants of the control group patients showed a meaningful difference with both the Basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhage and also the Middle cerebral artery infarction patient groups.
4) The frictional frequencies of the sibilance consonants between the Basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhage group, the Middle cerebral artery infarction patient group, and the control group showed a meaningful difference in the sibilance lax consonants and aspirated consonants.
5) The Basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhage patient group, the Middle cerebral artery infarction patient group, and the control group showed a meaningful difference in pause length and syllable enunciation length.
6) All groups showed a meaningful difference in the syllables per minute (SPM) for sentence 1 and 2.
7) In the Basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhage and Middle cerebral artery infarction patient groups, the syllables per minute (SPM) and articulation showed a high correlation.
Conclusion: This research was conducted with the expectations that the research data could help with speech Acoustic-perceptual characteristic symptoms of the Basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhage and the Middle cerebral artery infarction patient groups, and that it could also provide speech therapy effects.