Listener Training for Improved Intelligibility of People With Parkinson's Disease
Utah State University
Summary
Listener training offers a promising avenue for improving communication for people with dysarthria due to Parkinson's disease by offsetting the intelligibility burden from the patient onto their primary communication partners. Here, we employ a repeated-measures, randomized controlled trial to establish the efficacy of listener training for patients with PD and their primary communication partners. This translational work will establish a new realm of clinical practice in which the intelligibility impairments in PD are addressed by training partners to better understand dysarthric speech, thus elevating communication outcomes and participation in daily life.
Description
People with dysarthria due to Parkinson's disease (PD) frequently present with reduced intelligibility, which can have significant consequences, including reduced participation in situations involving communicating with others and resulting in social isolation.1-5 Few effective treatments exist to ease the intelligibility burden of dysarthria in PD, and most require significant cognitive and physical effort on the part of the speaker to achieve and maintain gains.6,7 Once people with PD have progressed beyond the early stages of the disease, and their cognitive and physical impairments limit t…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 18+ years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- No
Inclusion Criteria: * Primary language is English * 18 years or older * medical diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (patient participants) * speech diagnosis of hyperkinetic dysarthria, exhibiting hallmark characteristics (patient participants) Exclusion Criteria: * Severe cognitive impairment * Less than 18 years of age * Primary language other than English
Interventions
- BehavioralListener Training
Partner participants are presented with individual audio phrases that make up passage reading speech stimuli and orthographic transcriptions of what the patient is saying. Partners are asked to listen carefully to the audio files and use the written subtitles to help them understand what is being said.
Locations (2)
- Florida State UniversityTallahassee, Florida
- Utah State UniversityLogan, Utah