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

Study Results

Results available

Outcome measurements, participant flow, baseline characteristics, and adverse events have been published for this study.

View full results

Basic Information

Get a concise snapshot of the trial, including recruitment status, study phase, enrollment targets, and key timeline milestones.

Recruitment Status

COMPLETED

Clinical Phase

NA

Total Enrollment

217 participants

Study Classification

INTERVENTIONAL

Study Start Date

2021-04-26

Study Completion Date

2023-07-01

Brief Summary

Review the sponsor-provided synopsis that highlights what the study is about and why it is being conducted.

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.

Related Clinical Trials

Explore similar clinical trials based on study characteristics and research focus.

Listener Training for Improved Intelligibility of People With Parkinson's Disease

NCT06815263

Dysarthria, Hypokinetic

RECRUITING NA

Auditory-Perceptual Training Via Telepractice

NCT04858035

Speech Sound Disorder

COMPLETED NA

Auditory Prediction and Error Evaluation in the Speech of Individuals Who Stutter

NCT06181149

Healthy Subjects Stuttering, Developmental

RECRUITING NA

Effects of Altered Auditory Feedback on Speech Fluency

NCT06011837

Stuttering, Adult

UNKNOWN NA

A Systematic Investigation of Phonetic Complexity Effects on Articulatory Motor Performance in Progressive Dysarthria

NCT03613038

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Parkinson Disease

COMPLETED NA

Detailed Description

Dive into the extended narrative that explains the scientific background, objectives, and procedures in greater depth.

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.

Conditions

See the medical conditions and disease areas that this research is targeting or investigating.

Dysarthria Intelligibility, Speech

Study Design

Understand how the trial is structured, including allocation methods, masking strategies, primary purpose, and other design elements.

Allocation Method

RANDOMIZED

Intervention Model

PARALLEL

300 listeners will be recruited and enrolled. Each participant will be randomly assigned to receive perceptual training with one of 5 speakers with dysarthria, such that 30-50 listeners will be assigned to each speaker with dysarthria. All listener participants will receive the perceptual training intervention.

Primary Study Purpose

TREATMENT

Blinding Strategy

NONE

Study Groups

Review each arm or cohort in the study, along with the interventions and objectives associated with them.

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

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)

Group Type EXPERIMENTAL