Evaluation of Intensive Language Therapy

Due to Parkinson's Disease (PD) speech and language (SL) deficits may occur. Further, the literature reports that PD patients, who have not undergone deep brain stimulation (DBS), have deficits regarding voice quality (e.g. loudness and intelligibility of their voice), while PD patients who have undergone DBS suffer from deficits in word retrieval and speech apraxia symptoms. To-date, therapeutic approaches focusing specifically on SL deficits observed in PD-DBS patients are yet to be developed and evaluated. Therefore, this study investigates the short-and longterm effectiveness of specific and intensive, high-frequency speech-language therapy in terms of reducing SL-deficits compared to a nonspecific and non-verbal sham treatment (i.e. a rhythmic balance-movement training (rBMT)) as well as to a 'no-therapy' condition.