Parkinson’s Speech Pauses Track Sentence Complexity and MoCA Scores
A 2026 connected-speech study found that people with Parkinson’s disease produced more silent pauses than older controls while reading aloud: 2.185 vs. 1.595 mean pauses, while long sentences produced 2.676 pauses vs. 1.033 in short sentences.1 Within the Parkinson’s group, MoCA scores correlated with total pause count (rs = −0.502, p = 0.005). Research Highlights …