To date there have been few reports on dysarthria acquired in childhood, especially studies regarding articulation. The present report focuses on the case of a 5-year-old girl who suffered pseudobulbar palsy after cerebral infarction due to Moya Moya disease at the age of 4 years. She developed severe dysarthria with slight bilateral spastic paresis and right facial paresis. Lesions of bilateral frontal lobes were detected by MRI-CT. Angiography demonstrated the vascular shadow typical of Moya Moya disease in both cerebral hemispheres.
After cerebral infarction, the subject's intelligence and linguistic ability were impaired and her behavior became restless. She could speak vowels and a few distorted consonants : only ⁄h⁄⁄k⁄⁄g⁄⁄N⁄⁄j⁄. Her articulation was characterized by hypernasality, harsh voice, articulatory inaccuracy of consonants, low vocal pitch slow rate of speech, and prosodic insufficiency, similar to adult cases.
Analyses of the sound spectrogram and phonolaryngogram of her articulation revealed prolonged duration of each syllable and transfer of consonants to vowels, depression or disappearance of high frequencies over second formants, and abnormal pitch and intensity at beginnings and endings.
Although she manifested anarthria for two months after onset, her dysarthria has improved qradually during the three years since she started speech therapy.
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