School of Communication Science and Disorders (SCSD) Kaitlin Lansford recently received funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH) for her NIH R01 proposal, titled “Listener training for improved intelligibility of people with Parkinson’s disease.”

The funded project will focus on enhancing listener training, which offers a promising avenue for improving communication for people with dysarthria due to Parkinson’s disease by offsetting the intelligibility burden from the patient to their primary communication partners. Dysarthria is a motor-based impairment that can make speech production challenging to understand. Lansford’s work focuses on the listener who encounters speech that is difficult to understand, as opposed to the speaker with dysarthria.

The funded project is a clinical trial in which speakers with Parkinson’s disease and their family members and friends will be recruited to participate. The project aims to determine whether intelligibility and other communication outcomes improve following a perceptual training protocol.

“The hope is that this grant will expand clinical outcome measures. Across a number of studies, we have demonstrated improvements to intelligibility following perceptual training. We anticipate finding similar results in this clinical trial. But we do not yet know how perceptual training will impact listening effort, comprehension, and participation in communicative interactions. We are excited to learn more about the broader communication impacts of listener-based training,” Lansford said.

This project is co-led by Dr. Stephanie Borrie at Utah State University. Lansford is the project’s Principal Investigator (MPI) at FSU, where she will lead a research team that includes one graduate and two undergraduate research assistants.

Lansford explained how her interest in dysarthria came about. “There is a massive gap in the clinical management of people who have dysarthria because most therapies are focused on the speaker,” Lansford said. “However, very little can be done to improve speech production when you have a progressive neurological disease.” She found it interesting to focus more on the listener and explore that side of it.

“This research has potential one day help people with ALS, Huntington’s disease, multiple sclerosis, or other neurological diseases. It will set the stage for future expansion with other types of dysarthria, and improve communication outcomes with the people they love,” Lansford said.