Familiarization to Dysarthric Speech
What's the best way to get used to dysarthric speech so it's easier to understand?
Former doctoral student Mik Martinelli (now faculty at Midwestern State) led this computerized experiment to test two task methods with two training schedules to see which combination results in unfamiliar listeners understanding the speech of people with dysarthria, or speech that is hard to understand due to neurological or motor control effects. Effective training could be used with health care professionals and family members of people who have had strokes, aphasia, Parkinson's, cerebral palsy, and so on.
Papers
- Martinelli, M., Freeman, V., Loss, S., & Parveen, S. (in revision). Dysarthric speech familiarization: Distributed practice and interleaving.
Collaborators
- Micol Martinelli, Midwestern State
- Sabiha Parveen, OSU Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Sara Loss, OSU Linguistics
Student Corner
Data and Materials
- Audio clips of people with cerebral palsy and different severities of dysarthric speech reading sentences, words, or short stories.
- Training schedules and task modules organized in Qualtrics; pretest, post-test, answer keys.
- Responses of 18 participants, scored for number of words correct.
Project Ideas
- Compare other training tasks or schedules.
- Find/create other audio samples of people with different etiologies, severities, etc.
- Create a training program and pilot it with naive participants and/or healthcare workers.