Educational Information Improves Listener Attitudes Toward People With Dysarthria Secondary to Parkinson's Disease.

Purpose: People with dysarthria have been rated as less confident and less likable and are often assumed by listeners to have reduced cognitive abilities relative to neurotypical speakers. This study explores whether educational information about dysarthria can shift these attitudes in a group of speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria secondary to Parkinson's disease.

Method: One hundred seventeen listeners were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk to transcribe sentences and rate the confidence, intelligence, and likability of eight speakers with mild hypokinetic dysarthria.

Beyond Speech Intelligibility: Quantifying Behavioral and Perceived Listening Effort in Response to Dysarthric Speech.

Purpose: This study investigated whether listener processing of dysarthric speech requires the recruitment of more cognitive resources (i.e., higher levels of listening effort) than neurotypical speech.

Predicting Montreal Cognitive Assessment Scores From Measures of Speech and Language.

Purpose This study examined the relationship between measurements derived from spontaneous speech and participants' scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. Method Participants ( = 521) aged between 64 and 97 years completed the cognitive assessment and were prompted to describe an early childhood memory. A range of acoustic and linguistic measures was extracted from the resulting speech sample.

Examining Listener Reaction Time in the Perceptual Assessment of Dysarthria.

Objective: In the perceptual assessment of dysarthria, various approaches are used to examine the accuracy of listeners' speech transcriptions and their subjective impressions of speech disorder. However, less attention has been given to the effort and cognitive resources required to process speech samples. This study explores the relationship between transcription accuracy, comprehensibility, subjective impressions of speech, and objective measures of reaction time (RT) to further examine the challenges involved in processing dysarthric speech.

Predicting Intelligibility Gains in Dysarthria Through Automated Speech Feature Analysis.

Purpose: Behavioral speech modifications have variable effects on the intelligibility of speakers with dysarthria. In the companion article, a significant relationship was found between measures of speakers' baseline speech and their intelligibility gains following cues to speak louder and reduce rate (Fletcher, McAuliffe, Lansford, Sinex, & Liss, 2017). This study reexamines these features and assesses whether automated acoustic assessments can also be used to predict intelligibility gains.

Predicting Intelligibility Gains in Individuals With Dysarthria From Baseline Speech Features.

Purpose: Across the treatment literature, behavioral speech modifications have produced variable intelligibility changes in speakers with dysarthria. This study is the first of two articles exploring whether measurements of baseline speech features can predict speakers' responses to these modifications.

Methods: Fifty speakers (7 older individuals and 43 speakers with dysarthria) read a standard passage in habitual, loud, and slow speaking modes.

Assessing Vowel Centralization in Dysarthria: A Comparison of Methods.

Purpose: The strength of the relationship between vowel centralization measures and perceptual ratings of dysarthria severity has varied considerably across reports. This article evaluates methods of acoustic-perceptual analysis to determine whether procedural changes can strengthen the association between these measures.

Method: Sixty-one speakers (17 healthy individuals and 44 speakers with dysarthria) read a standard passage.

Effect of Dysarthria Type, Speaking Condition, and Listener Age on Speech Intelligibility.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the effect of loud and slow speech cues on younger and older listeners' comprehension of dysarthric speech, specifically, (a) whether one strategy, as opposed to the other, promoted greater intelligibility gains for different speaker groups; (b) whether older and younger listeners' understandings were differentially affected by these strategies; and (c) which acoustic changes best predicted intelligibility gain in individual speakers.

Method: Twenty younger and 40 older listeners completed a perceptual task. Six individuals with dysarthria produced phrases across habitual, loud, and slow conditions.

The relationship between speech segment duration and vowel centralization in a group of older speakers.

This study examined the relationship between average vowel duration and spectral vowel quality across a group of 149 New Zealand English speakers aged 65 to 90 yr. The primary intent was to determine whether participants who had a natural tendency to speak slowly would also produce more spectrally distinct vowel segments. As a secondary aim, this study investigated whether advancing age exhibited a measurable effect on vowel quality and vowel durations within the group.