title: Cognitive-perceptual examination of remediation approaches to hypokinetic dysarthria.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To determine how increased vocal loudness and reduced speech rate affect listeners' cognitive-perceptual processing of hypokinetic dysarthric speech associated with Parkinson's disease.
  
  
  METHODS
  Fifty-one healthy listener participants completed a speech perception experiment. Listeners repeated phrases produced by 5 individuals with dysarthria across habitual, loud, and slow speaking modes. Listeners were allocated to habitual ( n = 17), loud ( n = 17), or slow ( n = 17) experimental conditions. Transcripts derived from the phrase repetition task were coded for overall accuracy (i.e., intelligibility), and perceptual error analyses examined how these conditions affected listeners' phonemic mapping (i.e., syllable resemblance) and lexical segmentation (i.e., lexical boundary error analysis).
  
  
  RESULTS
  Both speech conditions provided obvious perceptual benefits to listeners. Overall, transcript accuracy was highest in the slow condition. In the loud condition, however, improvement was evidenced across the experiment. An error analysis suggested that listeners in the loud condition prioritized acoustic-phonetic cues in their attempts to resolve the degraded signal, whereas those in the slow condition appeared to preferentially weight lexical stress cues.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Increased loudness and reduced rate exhibited differential effects on listeners' perceptual processing of dysarthric speech. The current study highlights the insights that may be gained from a cognitive-perceptual approach.
authors.forename: Megan J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: McAuliffe
authors.forename: Sarah E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Kerr
authors.forename: Elizabeth M R
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Gibson
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Anderson
authors.forename: Patrick J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: LaShell
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000072466:Cognitive Remediation / Q000379:methods*; D003463:Cues; D004401:Dysarthria / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000150:complications; D010700:Phonetics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult