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What is it about?
It is often assumed that speech production is automatic. This research shows that speech performance is sensitive to the sharing of attention with a non-verbal task. Studying a group of individuals with Parkinson's disease, we showed that the attention required to speak is related to the severity of speech difficulties in this group, as well as the performance in cognitive shifting.
Why is it important?
Our findings show that even the motor stages of speech encoding require attention, at least in individuals with Parkinson's disease and that cognitive shifting may help the encoding of the motor stages of speech. These results may help identifying strategies in motor-speech therapy and understanding the relationship between speech production and attention.