Perceptual Training to Improve Listeners' Ability to Understand Speech Produced by Individuals With Dysarthria

Utah State University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Intelligibility, Speech; Dysarthria

Treatments: Behavioral: Perceptual Training

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other; NIH

Identifiers

NCT04897711

R21DC018867 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

11110 (Registry Identifier)

Details and patient eligibility

About

There exist very few effective treatments that ease the intelligibility burden of dysarthria. Perceptual training offers a promising avenue for improving intelligibility of dysarthric speech by offsetting the communicative burden from the speaker with dysarthria on to their primary communication partners-family, friends, and caregivers. This project, utilizing advanced explanatory models, will permit identification of speaker and listener parameters, and their interactions, that allow perceptual training paradigms to be optimized for intelligibility outcomes in dysarthria rehabilitation. This work addresses this critical gap in clinical practice and sets the stage for extension of dysarthria management to listener-targeted remediation-advancing clinical practice and enhanced communication and quality of life outcomes for this population.

Full description

There exist very few effective treatments that ease the intelligibility burden of dysarthria, and all of these require cognitive and physical effort on the part of the speaker to achieve and maintain gains. Therefore, individuals with intelligibility deficits whose cognitive and physical impairments limit their ability to modify their speech are currently not viable treatment candidates. This constitutes a significant health disparity that disproportionately affects those clinical populations with developmental, cognitive, and/or significant neuromuscular impairment.

To address this critical gap in current dysarthria management, the weight of behavioral change is shifted from the speaker to the listener. While a novel concept for dysarthria management, the idea is firmly rooted in the field of psycholinguistics and supported by a programmatic body of research showing that listener-targeted perceptual training paradigms (wherein listeners are familiarized with the degraded speech signal and provided with an orthographic transcription of what the speaker is saying) result in statistically and clinically significant intelligibility gains in dysarthria. Further, preliminary evidence suggests that these intelligibility outcomes may be influenced by hypothesis-driven speaker parameters, such as acoustic predictability of speech rhythm cues, and listener parameters, such as expertise in rhythm perception.

A requisite next step to bringing listener-targeted perceptual training closer to clinical implementation, and the overarching goal of this clinical trial, is the systematic and rigorous analysis of the speaker and listener parameters, and their interactions, that modulate, and in some cases optimize, perceptual training benefits of intelligibility improvement. To achieve this aim, an existing database of dysarthric speech (20 speakers with dysarthria) and a large cohort of listeners (n = 400) across two well-established testing sites, Utah State University and Florida State University are utilized. Thus, the key deliverable resulting from this work will be explanatory models that account for the unique and joint contributions of speaker and listener parameters on the magnitude of intelligibility improvement following perceptual training with dysarthric speech.

Enrollment: 217 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 80 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

*Native speakers of American English

Exclusion criteria

• No self-reported history of speech impairment
• No self-reported history of language impairment
• No self-reported history of cognitive impairment

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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217 participants in 5 patient groups

Perceptual training with a speaker with dysarthria - Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)

Experimental group

Description:

To examine the effect of perceptual training with different speakers with dysarthria, we use a standard three-phase perceptual training protocol involving pretest, training, and posttest phases. Speech samples from a single speaker with dysarthria are utilized for all three phases. In this arm, listener participants were assigned to Speaker 1 (mixed flaccid-spastic dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)

Treatment:

Behavioral: Perceptual Training

Perceptual training with a speaker with dysarthria - Ataxic 1

Experimental group

Description:

To examine the effect of perceptual training with different speakers with dysarthria, we use a standard three-phase perceptual training protocol involving pretest, training, and posttest phases. Speech samples from a single speaker with dysarthria are utilized for all three phases. In this arm, listener participants were assigned to Speaker 2 (Ataxic dysarthria due to cerebellar degeneration)

Treatment:

Behavioral: Perceptual Training

Perceptual training with a speaker with dysarthria - Parkinson's disease (PD) 1

Experimental group

Description:

To examine the effect of perceptual training with different speakers with dysarthria, we use a standard three-phase perceptual training protocol involving pretest, training, and posttest phases. Speech samples from a single speaker with dysarthria are utilized for all three phases. In this arm, listener participants were assigned to Speaker 3 (hypokinetic dysarthria due to Parkinson's disease)

Treatment:

Behavioral: Perceptual Training

Perceptual training with a speaker with dysarthria - Ataxic 2

Experimental group

Description:

To examine the effect of perceptual training with different speakers with dysarthria, we use a standard three-phase perceptual training protocol involving pretest, training, and posttest phases. Speech samples from a single speaker with dysarthria are utilized for all three phases. In this arm, listener participants were assigned to Speaker 4 (Ataxic dysarthria due to cerebellar degeneration)

Treatment:

Behavioral: Perceptual Training

Perceptual training with a speaker with dysarthria - Parkinson's disease (PD) 2

Experimental group

Description:

To examine the effect of perceptual training with different speakers with dysarthria, we use a standard three-phase perceptual training protocol involving pretest, training, and posttest phases. Speech samples from a single speaker with dysarthria are utilized for all three phases. In this arm, listener participants were assigned to Speaker 5 (hypokinetic dysarthria due to Parkinson's disease)

Treatment:

Behavioral: Perceptual Training