SCSD Associate Professor Published In Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research

Kailtin Lansford Headshot

Associate Professor in the School of Communication Science and Disorders, Kaitlin Lansford, and her team were recently published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Her group’s article, “Regularity Matters: Unpredictable Speech Degradation Inhibits Adaptation to Dysarthric Speech,focuses on Dysarthria, a mobile speech disorder arising from neurological damage or disease that often results in impaired intelligibility.

The work for this study was conducted in the Motor Speech Disorders Lab at Florida State University in collaboration with the Human Interaction Lab at Utah State University. The efforts of both labs aimed to address the “critical gap in clinical practice by improving the listener’s experience with disordered speech through perceptual training.”

According to the abstract, the group’s study included forty listeners who “completed the standard 3-phase perceptual training protocol (pretest, training, and posttest) with 1 of 2 talkers with hyperkinetic dysarthria. Perceptual data were compared to a historical data set for 1 other talker with hyperkinetic dysarthria to examine the effect of perceptual training on intelligibility.”

The group found that “perceptual training may be negligible for speakers whose dysarthria is largely characterized by unpredictable speech features,” says Lansford. These results call for more research to be done on the signal predictability in perceptual learning of dysarthric speech.