Perceptual and acoustic predictors of intelligibility and acceptability in Cantonese speakers with dysarthria

Abstract

The primary aim of this study was to determine contributing factors to listener judgments of acceptability, a global measure of severity, in speakers with dysarthria. Participants included 33 Cantonese speakers with dysarthria, ages 14-78 years, with mixed etiology (including Parkinson disease, cerebral palsy, and cerebrovascular accident [CVA]. Listeners were 12 speech and hearing sciences students. In addition to measuring acceptability and sentence intelligibility, nine perceptual measures and nine acoustic measures related to aspects of voice, resonance, and prosody were investigated. Moderate to strong correlations were found between several of these "suprasegmental" variables and acceptability. However, sentence intelligibility was the primary predictor of acceptability judgments. Several explanations are offered for correlations between the perceptual and acoustic variables and sentence intelligibility, as well as acceptability.