The
impact of speech supplementation on the intelligibility of speakers with
traumatic brain injury
By D.R.
Beukelman,
The purpose of this study was
to investigate the differences in speech intelligibility (percent of words
understood) for sentences among (a) habitual speech, (b) "clear
speech", (c) alphabet supplemented speech, (d) topic supplemented speech,
(e) alphabet supplementation superimposed on habitual speech. Eight persons
with severe dysarthria following traumatic brain
injury participated in this project. Speakers were video recorded as they
produced 10 Hearing In Noise Test sentences under each
of the condition. Five listeners transcribed the speech samples for the 5
experimental conditions. Supplemented speech yielded higher sentence
intelligibility scores than habitual speech. Alphabet supplemented speech
yielded higher sentence intelligibility scores than topic supplemented speech.
"Clear speech" yielded slightly higher scores than habitual speech
for some participants.