School of Communication Science and Disorders Doctoral students Austin Thompson and Micah Hirsch, along with co-authors Dr. Kaitlin Lansford and Dr. Yunjung Kim, recently had their paper published in the March edition of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (JSHLR).

JSHLR is a top-tier journal of the American Speech Language Hearing Association.

The paper “Vowel Acoustics as Predictors of Speech Intelligibility in Dysarthria” investigated the efficacy of several acoustic measures in predicting speech intelligibility (or how people can understand a speaker). Some of the acoustic measures were traditional and required manual calculations (e.g., vowel space area and corner dispersion), while others were newer and automatic, making them more suitable for clinical use (e.g., vowel space hull and vowel space density).

Hirch and Thompson developed the initial idea of the research and paper, and their mentors Drs. Lansford and Kim provided guidance throughout the entire project.

“The takeaway from this study is that, while the automatic measures of vowel space area are very easy to calculate, making it easier to adopt in clinical settings, these automatic measures do not perform as well as the traditional manual measures of vowel space area,” says Thompson. “We hope this work will encourage future research in this area and help advance the field of speech-language pathology, ultimately leading to improved outcomes for our patients.”