A Longitudinal Study of
Speech Fluency Stability in an Adductor
Spasmodic Dysphonic Individual Treated with Botox
A Salvatore, A Biswas, B Manriquez, M Cannito
The nature of the stability of speech fluency over time is not clear in individuals with spasmodic dysphonia treated with botox. In the present study a 54-year-old male with the diagnosis of adductor spasmodic dysphonia was tracked over a span of 26 months. During that time the participant had nine botox injections. A total of 24 recordings of the participantís reading of the Rainbow Passage were made pre and post-injections. Stability was defined as the ability to identify a reading as being done pre or post injection. Four measures of speech fluency were used in this analysis. Both a linear discriminant analysis and a self-organizing artificial neural net were used to analyze the data. Both procedures were successful in categorizing approximately 80% of the readings into pre and post injection categories using four variables; total pause time, total articulation time words read per minute, and the frequency of speech disfluencies. We also evaluated whether we could identify those readings that were one, and two months post injection from those readings done just prior to an injection.