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Essay On Dysarthria

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Increased loudness and reduced speech rate are regularly used to improve intelligibility for individuals with dysarthria. Though neither of these techniques produce consistent improvements and there are varying treatment results for people with dysarthria. Prior studies show that groups of participants with the same neurological etiology or dysarthria subtype do not always achieve similar intelligibility improvements in treatment and there is no obvious choice as to which behavioral modification produces the best outcomes (Mcauliffe, M. J., Fletcher, A. R., Kerr, S. E., Obeirne, G. A., & Anderson, T, 2017.) These varied outcomes are likely due to differences in speech characteristics exhibited by individuals in the treatment groups …show more content…

This study aimed to determine, within two groups of speakers with perceptually similar speech patterns (ataxic and hypokinetic dysarthria) and intelligibility levels, which treatment strategy, increased loudness or reduced speech rate provided optimal gains for listener perception. Also, if older and younger listener participants differed in their ability to resolve this degraded signal. Finally, the study examined the relationship between individual speaker’s degree of intelligibility change and the variation in acoustic measures across conditions. Data was obtained from these and the information was then subjected to statistical analysis. This current study went on to show that a loud speech cue produced significant improvements in listener’s ability to comprehend dysarthric speech, but the slow condition did not. Dysarthria subtype did not affect the outcomes as neither subtype produced differential improvements using one condition over another. As for the listeners, older listeners exhibited significantly reduced ability to comprehend dysarthric speech relative to younger listeners, but there were not any differential effects observed for speech condition or dysarthria type. It was noted that the speakers’ degree of intelligibility improvement was not related to the change in intensity or reduction in speech

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