Kaitlin Lansford (pictured left), Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in FSU School of Communication Science and Disorders (SCSD), recently published research in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (JSLHR).
The paper is titled, “When Additional Training Isn’t Enough: Further Evidence That Unpredictable Speech Inhibits Adaptation,” and aims to address gaps in clinical practice by improving the listener’s experience with disordered speech through perceptual training. Conducted in the Motor Speech Disorders Lab at FSU, the research was done in partnership with the Human Interaction Lab at Utah State University, and thesis work from former SCSD student Cassidy Flechaus was also used.
“This study extends our earlier work by demonstrating that listeners are unable to derive benefit from perceptual training for some speakers even if the training parameters are changed to provide more feedback or exposure during the training experience,” Lansford explains. “As we bring perceptual training closer to clinical implementation, it is important to determine candidacy. This work is important because it tells us a bit more about the types of speakers for whom perceptual training would not be recommended as a potential treatment option.”
The abstract is below:
“Robust improvements in intelligibility following familiarization, a listener-targeted perceptual training paradigm, have been revealed for talkers diagnosed with spastic, ataxic, and hypokinetic dysarthria but not for talkers with hyperkinetic dysarthria. While the theoretical explanation for the lack of intelligibility improvement following training with hyperkinetic talkers is that there is insufficient distributional regularity in the speech signals to support perceptual adaptation, it could simply be that the standard training protocol was inadequate to facilitate the learning of the unpredictable talker. In a pair of experiments, we addressed this possible alternate explanation by modifying the levels of exposure and feedback provided by the perceptual training protocol to offer listeners a more robust training experience.”