Research Symposium

BIO

My name is Samantha and I am so excited to be presenting at my first research symposium! I spent my whole first year at FSU studying abroad and I dove right into research as soon as I arrived at main campus this year. I was so drawn to this project because I want to help listeners to better understand speech disorders and make social interaction easier for those with speech disorders.

Listening Effort in Dysarthria

Abstract

Dysarthria is a type of motor speech disorder that impacts the muscles used for speech production, often resulting in changes to a person’s speech and voice quality. This, in turn, can make it difficult for communication partners to understand dysarthric speech. The current study will investigate the role of listening effort in the perception of dysarthric speech using pupil dilation and self reported effort ratings. During the speech perception task, participants will be seated in front of a computer equipped with an eye tracking camera and listen to semantically anomalous phrases spoken by a speaker with dysarthria or a healthy control speaker. While listening to the phrase their pupil dilation will be tracked by the eye-tracking camera. After hearing the phrase, they will be instructed to repeat back what they heard and provide a rating of their listening effort on a 7-point Likert scale. Participants will complete a total of 80 trials, 40 from the speaker with dysarthria and 40 from the healthy control speaker. Then, participants will complete selected assessments from the NIH Toolbox Cognitive Battery. Data collection for the study is currently ongoing. However, study hypotheses and future plans will be discussed.

Keywords: Listening effort, dysarthria, cognitive effort