Emily Redd, MS
Christopher Dromey, PhD
Department of Communication Disorders
Brigham Young University
disclosure statement

I have no relevant financial or
nonfinancial relationships to disclose.
introduction
prosody – linguistic, affective
 sex differences in perception
 prosody and dysarthria
 previous research

 Laures & Weismer (1999)
 Bunton, Kent, Kent, & Duffy (2001)
research questions
What is the extent to which F0 variation
contributes to intelligibility deficits in
dysarthric speech?
 To what degree can prosody be
synthetically altered in dysarthric speech
before significantly impacting
intelligibility?
 What role does gender play in the
perception of prosodic cues?

speakers and task

speakers
○ dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy
○ one mild
○ one severe

speaking task
 50 low predictability sentences
sentence stimuli
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Time stated she should leave that day.
Animals often wander across wooded grassy paths.
Dogs with shaggy white coats appear fuzzy.
They began mixing dangerous materials by beaches.
Math instructors always allow pens before testing.
Mark buys baby elephants salty, crunchy cashews.
Black, wild, furry creatures act rather mysteriously.
Old baking books seem cheaper every summer.
Rich bankers enjoy small, rustic, summer homes.
Giant plastic bracelets do well each season.
procedure

speech sample manipulation
 Praat software
 F0 contour reduction
○ half
○ three-quarters
○ fully flattened
original
half reduced
three quarters reduced
fully reduced
listeners and task

listeners
 50 (32 women, 18 men)
 passed hearing screening at 20 dB HL

listening task
 40 sentences
○ 5 sentences of each condition for mild and
severe speaker
○ counterbalanced to avoid repeats
transcription, confidence rating
results: transcription accuracy
speaker 1
(mild dysarthria)
speaker 2
(severe dysarthria)
results: listener confidence ratings
speaker 1
(mild dysarthria)
speaker 2
(severe dysarthria)
results: gender differences
(transcription accuracy)
results: gender differences
(listener confidence ratings)
discussion
prosody plays an important role in
speech intelligibility, particularly in
dysarthric speech
 women outperformed men in both
transcription accuracy and listener
confidence ratings

limitations and directions for
further research
only dysarthria secondary to cerebral
palsy was considered
 there were more female listeners than
male listeners
 only modifications to the F0 contour
were made

thank you!