INVESTIGATING ATTENTION TO SPEECH IN SAUDI PARKINSON'S DISEASE PATIENTS

Abstract

In general, most studies conducted on Parkinson’s disease focus on the motor symptoms; therefore, there is a notable dearth of studies of the cognitive and language abilities in PD patients, especially in those who speak a diglossic native language. The present study is the first to address ability of PD patients who speak a diglossic language to pay attention to their speech and shift to the formal variety, focusing on Saudi PD patients’ ability to pay attention to their speech and shift to the formal code of Arabic. Twenty-one Saudi idiopathic Parkinson’s disease patients who were at different stages of impairment and twenty-one healthy Saudi individuals were recruited for this study. The two groups were approximately matched for age, education, and gender. The researcher conducted semi-structured phone interviews with the participants. The interview data were then transcribed and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively, with care taken to notice any divergence from the low variety towards the high variety of Arabic. The results showed that the PD patients’ attention to speech mechanism was impaired at various levels based on many factors, such as the patient's age, retention of medication in the bloodstream, and date of PD diagnosis. These findings suggest that the deficit to the basal ganglia in Parkinson’s disease patients affects the attention to speech mechanism. Consequently, PD patients who speak a diglossic language natively may find it difficult to pay sufficient attention to their speech to shift to the high variety of the language in formal settings.