Estimating the Intelligibility of Speakers with Dysarthria

Abstract

Many speakers with dysarthria have reduced intelligibility[,] and improving intelligibility is often a primary intervention objective. Consequently, measurement of intelligibility provides important information that is useful for clinical decision-making. The present study compared two different measures of intelligibility obtained in audio-only and audio-visual modalities for 4 different speakers with dysarthria (2 with mild-moderate dysarthria; 2 with severe dysarthria) secondary to cerebral palsy. A total of 80 college-aged listeners provided word-by-word transcriptions and made percent estimates of intelligibility which served as dependent variables. Group results showed that transcription measures were higher than percent estimates of intelligibility overall. There was also an interaction between speakers and measures of intelligibility, indicating that the difference between transcription scores and percent estimates varied among individual speakers. Results revealed a significant main effect for presentation modality, with the audio-visual modality having slightly higher scores than the audio-only modality; however, presentation modality did not interact with speakers or with measures of intelligibility. Results suggest that standard clinical measurement of intelligibility using orthographic transcription may be more consistent than the use of more subjective percent estimates.

Combining Non-Pathological Data of Different Language Varieties to Improve DNN-HMM Performance on Pathological Speech

“…When comparing the percentage scores obtained for the different measures, results show, first, that word level scoring produces higher intelligibility scores than utterance level scoring. This is in line with earlier research [11] suggesting that when using subjective rating scales, raters tend to underestimate the extent to which speakers are intelligible. A rater may, for example, understand every word, but still judge intelligibility as less than perfect when higherthan-normal listening effort is required because of articulatory irregularities.…”

“…to listen to speech fragments and write down what they hear (e.g., [11,2,12]). For this form of intelligibility measurement, different types of speech material can be used, including isolated words or pseudowords, whole sentences, and Semantically Unpredictable Sentences (SUS) [3].…”

“…In general, orthographic transcriptions of regular or SUS sentences are scored at the word level: each word is scored as either correct or incorrect [11,18]. Yet, both Hustad et al [1] and Beijer et al [19] argue that such word level scoring may still be quite broad, suggesting that it may be necessary to also collect judgments at even finer levels of granularity, i.e.…”

Implementing two treatment approaches to childhood dysarthria

“…Further research is needed to explore the relationships among speech treatment, expansion of vowel space, intelligibility, and communicative participation by children with CP. More objective measures of intelligibility, such as percentage of vowels accurately transcribed orthographically (Hustad, 2006), are underway in the Speech Production and Perception Lab. Results suggest that special attention should be paid to treating children ' s front and low vowel productions, as these are the least intelligible vowels for most of our participants (Levy, Seid, Chen, Leone, Moya-Gale, Hsu, et al, 2014).…”

Potentials of Telehealth Devices for Speech Therapy in Parkinson's Disease

“…This is in contrast to related questions on the intelligibility and naturalness of synthesized speech, where researchers agreed on a number of well-documented protocols to assess these aspects of computer speech (see the Blizzard Challenge, a yearly competition among speech synthesis systems based on corpora, see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/). For a review of problems encountered in subjective methods to assess intelligibility we refer to Beijer, Clapham & Rietveld (submitted) and Hustad (2006). Even if the correct operationalizations are available, a number of other questions have to be answered before ecologically valid effectiveness studies can be carried out.…”