“Intelligibility of Speech Produced in Communicative Interactions Between People With Dysarthria Secondary to ALS and Their Interlocutors”
Annie Olmstead, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Penn State
Department of Communication Sciences
and Disorders
Interpersonal communication is a highly dynamic process during which interlocutors continuously share information with one another in both linguistic and non-linguistic forms. This information sharing supports a collaborative process of determining shared meaning and has been successfully utilized in clinical interventions for people with language disorders. However, such an approach is not currently taken to support individuals with speech disorders such as dysarthria. In this talk, Annie Olmstead will describe the results of an initial investigation into the phonetic changes wrought by communicative interaction between people with dysarthria secondary to ALS and healthy interlocutors. Participants performed a word matching task in pairs. Productions from these interactions were compared to habitual and clear speech productions by the same individuals. We observed differences between the tasks in both acoustic properties and intelligibility of produced speech.