Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 9, 2026
A Protocol for Comprehensive Assessment of Bulbar Dysfunction in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)
Published on: February 21, 2011
Automated analysis of expressive prosody in Dutch patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and
Lize C Jiskoot1,2, Olaiya Aro1, Liset de Boer1
1Department of Neurology and Alzheimer Center Erasmus MC Erasmus MC University Medical Centre Rotterdam the Netherlands.
Background:
Previous studies have demonstrated impaired expressive prosody in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), but have been conducted in English-speaking cohorts. To examine whether findings generalize across languages, we replicated prior work in Dutch patients.
Methods:
We examined expressive prosodic features in semi-structured speech samples from patients with behavioral variant FTD (bvFTD; n = 17), primary progressive aphasia (PPA; n = 74) and controls (n = 45). We assessed group differences, classification abilities, and associations with neuropsychological tests and gray matter volume.
Results:
Patients with non-fluent variant PPA (nfvPPA) showed the narrowest f0 range and shortest speech duration. f0 range separated patients with reduced prosody (nfvPPA/bvFTD) from those with relatively preserved prosody (semantic variant PPA/logopenic variant PPA). Lower f0 range correlated with reduced fluency and frontotemporal atrophy.
Discussion:
Viewing expressive prosody as a multidimensional system helps explain why FTD syndromes become dysprosodic in different ways and highlights its diagnostic relevance. Future studies with larger patient samples in less canonical subtypes are needed to replicate and extend our findings.
