Background Huntington’s Disease (HD) is a neurodegenerative disease causing a triad of symptoms: motor, cognitive and behavioral impairments. Language and speech have also been widely noted to decline as HD progresses. Less clear is how the use of communication tracks (disfluencies) evolves as the disease progresses. Yet, detailed studies characterizing disfluencies and their timings in HD spontaneous speech are lacking.

Aims To understand their link with disease progression, we examined disfluency characteristics in individuals with HD.

Methods Participants performed different spontaneous speech tasks: recalling the last 24h, emotional stories, the Little Red Riding Hood story, and the cookie theft description. 119 individuals with HD were included according to the disease’s stage (preHD, HD1, HD2), and 24 healthy controls.

Results We observed differences between symptomatic HD and healthy controls for the primary track, incidental and secondary ratios. This means that the overall communication efficiency is reduced as the disease progresses. Also, the secondary track ratio is reduced, meaning that HD’s filled pauses and revisions are shorter, and HD have difficulty regulating conversations. Finally, we witnessed an increase of the incidental ratio, encompassing vocal noises, phonological fragments and unintelligible words.

Conclusion This study improves the understanding of HD language deterioration. These markers can be potentially used as an objective marker for clinical follow-up allowing clinicians to provide better care and rehabilitation. In future work, we will correlate these disfluency markers to global, cognitive, functional and motor statuses.