Effects of Linguistic Cues and Stimulus Cohesion on Intelligibility of Severely Dysarthric Speech

This study examined the effects of supplemental cues on the intelligibility of unrelated sentences and related sentences (narratives) produced by 4 women with severe dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy. Visual images containing alphabet, topic, combined (alphabet and topic together), and no cues were imposed in real time on audio speech samples and presented to 72 nondisabled listeners. Statistical results showed that cue conditions had similar effects on unrelated and on related sentence intelligibility. Combined cues resulted in higher intelligibility scores than any other cue condition, no cues resulted in lower intelligibility scores than any other cue condition, and alphabet cues yielded higher intelligibility scores than topic cues. Intelligibility of related and unrelated sentences differed only for alphabet cues where related sentences had greater intelligibility than unrelated sentences. Results are discussed relative to the quantity and type of cues.