Le patologie del parlato e il ruolo dello studio strumentale dell'articolazione

There are multiple communication channels that may be exploited simultaneously, enabling speaker and listener to fully use multimodal information. Communication, and in particular dialogical exchange, is not equally affected by the lack of information related to the various channels. Clearly it is not obvious that it exists a hierarchy of relative importance for the communication channels, but the outcome of the communication can be more or less compromised depending on the channel that fails or along which the flow of information is altered. . In this study, we consider some motor speech disorders involving problems in the articulation of sounds during speech production and, therefore, motor disorders that can alter a crucial aspect in communication and, in particular, in the dialogic exchange. The aim of this work is to show that the instrumental study of speech articulation, which is usual nowadays in some branches of phonetics and laboratory phonology, can provide a useful contribution to the description and explanation of many diseases, and their treatment by means of different therapies and specific training (Duffy, 2010). This paper aims to emphasize that the instrumental analysis of speech production can have a clear impact on the improvement of communication in the case of speech pathology. The contribution proposes an overview of the main motor speech disorders and the main problems they cause in the articulation of speech; then, it describes instrumental investigations reported in the literature, focusing attention on investigations conducted in clinical settings, with various tools, but especially on investigations and data collected through elettromagnetic articulography and ultrasound. The work reveals that articulatory data provide a useful contribution to the study of motor speech disorders, in particular, for the description, the explanation, and the treatment in the rehabilitation phase. Therefore, the positive impact of articulatory studies on improving the capacity and the ease of communication and dialogue exchange in the case of many motor speech disorders is clear. Moreover, the survey also shows the severe under-representation of investigations relating to Italian. At the moment investigations on Italian are few and only related to stuttering.