Pausing and fluency in speech of patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) causes a variety of symptoms in speech production, such as more frequent pauses and an increase in the duration of pauses in the speech. However, there is almost no data on whether the disease affects speech fluency in other ways, such as changes in the frequency of disfluencies in speech. The main question of this study is the following: if we examine speech fluency in speech tasks requiring different cognitive load, will there be a difference between patients and controls? Twenty people with relapsing-remitting MS (3 men and 17 women) and 20 age- and education-matched control speakers (4 men and 16 women) participated in the study. Speech samples were recorded with each participant in three speech tasks: 1) spontaneous narratives about their own lives, 2) narratives about their previous day, and 3) narrative recalls based on a heard text. In the speech samples, pauses and disfluencies were annotated and the duration of pauses was measured. Then, the frequency of pauses and disfluencies were calculated and the types of disfluencies were examined. The results show that there are differences in the frequency and duration of pauses between people with MS and controls. However, there were no significant differences in the frequency of disfluencies between the groups. The same types of disfluencies occurred in the same frequency in both groups. The results help to better understand the speech production processes in MS.