BIO

My name is Meredith Strickland, and I am a junior here at Florida State University studying speech therapy. I was a registered behavior therapist for children with developmental disorders and absolutely loved every second of it. In my free time I enjoy reading and painting.

Prosodic Contributions to Intelligibility

Abstract

Dysarthria is a neurologic speech disorder that affects the accuracy, speed, and strength of the movement required for speech production. As a result of these speech deficits, speech intelligibility, or how well one is understood, is nearly always impaired in speakers with dysarthria. Many factors contribute to speech intelligibility, including prosodic features such as articulation rate, pitch variation, and intensity variation. This study evaluates the relationship between prosodic features and intelligibility in speakers with dysarthria. Previously recorded readings of the Grandfather Passage from 20 speakers with dysarthria were used in this study. Additionally, seventy naive listeners were recruited to provide two measures of speech intelligibility: (1) orthographic transcriptions and (2) visual analog scale (VAS) ratings of intelligibility. Prosodic measures, including articulation rate, pitch variation, and intensity variation, were measured from the speech samples. Multiple linear regression will be used to investigate the predictive relationship between prosodic features of speech with speech intelligibility in speakers with dysarthria. The models will examine both the relationship of these prosodic measures with OT scores and VAS ratings of intelligibility. The findings will provide a deeper understanding of how prosodic features predict speech intelligibility in speakers with dysarthria.

Keywords: Dysarthria, Prosody, Intelligibility