A Vowel-Centric View Toward Characterizing Temporal Organization of Motor Speech Activities in Neurologically Impaired and Healthy Speakers.

The findings provide preliminary support for vowel-centric temporal organization of motor speech activities. Such temporal organization holds some extent of both stability and flexibility, which may facilitate the parsing of syllabic events during auditory processing, while accommodating task-specific suprasegmental variations. The timing impairments in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis are likely attributed to the disease-imposed dynamic constraints, reducing the entrainment of the related motor speech activities to the underlying linguistic elements. These findings have potential implications in guiding the assessment and management of temporal speech deficits in ALS.