The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between scaled speech intelligibility and selected acoustic variables in persons with dysarthria. Control speakers and speakers with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson's disease (PD) produced sentences which were analyzed acoustically and perceptually. The acoustic variables included total utterance durations, segment durations, estimates of the acoustic vowel space, and slopes of formant transitions; the perceptual variables included scaled speech intelligibility and severity of speech involvement. Results indicated that the temporal variables typically differentiated the ALS group, but not the PD group, from the controls, and that vowel spaces were smaller for both neurogenic groups as compared to controls, but only significantly so for the ALS speakers. The relation of these acoustic measures to scaled speech intelligibility is shown to be complex, and the composite results are discussed in terms of sentence vs. single-word intelligibility estimates and their underlying acoustic bases.

The acoustic and intelligibility characteristics of sentence production in neurogenic speech Disorders

Management of motor speech discorders in children and adults

Purpose Speech acoustic characteristics of children with cerebral palsy (CP) were examined with a multiple speech subsystems approach; speech intelligibility was evaluated using a prediction model in which acoustic measures were selected to represent three speech subsystems. Method Nine acoustic variables reflecting different subsystems, and speech intelligibility, were measured in 22 children with CP. These children included 13 with a clinical diagnosis of dysarthria (speech motor impairment [SMI] group) and 9 judged to be free of dysarthria (no SMI [NSMI] group). Data from children with CP were compared to data from age-matched typically developing children. Results Multiple acoustic variables reflecting the articulatory subsystem were different in the SMI group, compared to the NSMI and typically developing groups. A significant speech intelligibility prediction model was obtained with all variables entered into the model (adjusted R2 = .801). The articulatory subsystem showed the most substantial inde...

Predicting Speech Intelligibility with a Multiple Speech Subsystems Approach in Children with Cerebral Palsy.

Static measurements of vowel formant frequencies and bandwidths: A review

Purpose The authors examined speech intelligibility in typically developing (TD) children and 3 groups of children with cerebral palsy (CP) who were classified into speech/language profile groups following Hustad, Gorton, and Lee (2010). Questions addressed differences in transcription intelligibility scores among groups, the effects of utterance length on intelligibility, the relationship between ordinal ratings of intelligibility and orthographic transcription intelligibility scores, and the difference between parent and naive listener ordinal ratings. Method Speech samples varying in length from 1 to 7 words were elicited from 23 children with CP (Mage = 54.3 months) and 20 TD children (Mage = 55.1 months). Two hundred fifteen naive listeners made orthographic transcriptions and ordinal ratings of intelligibility. Parent ordinal ratings of intelligibility were obtained from a previous study (Hustad et al., 2010). Results Intelligibility varied with speech/language profile group and utterance length, wi...

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Intelligibility of 4-Year-Old Children With and Without Cerebral Palsy

Purpose In this study, the authors proposed and tested a preliminary speech and language classification system for children with cerebral palsy. Method Speech and language assessment data were coll...

Kristin Gorton

Papers

Classification of Speech and Language Profiles in 4-Year-Old Children With Cerebral Palsy: A Prospective Preliminary Study