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Towards Development of Intelligibility Assessment for Dysphonic Speech

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2017, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Allied Health Sciences: Communication Sciences and Disorders.
Dysphonia affects one’s ability to produce voice. Because voice is the most fundamental component of speech, it is not surprising that many speakers with dysphonia report decreased intelligibility in everyday communication environments. Despite this report, intelligibility is not routinely measured in clinical assessment of dysphonia. Because the intelligibility deficit is most noticeable in noisy environments, measuring the deficit requires thorough understanding of the interaction between dysphonia, background noise and intelligibility. Understanding this interaction would also help development of treatment approaches for maximizing intelligibility for chronically dysphonic patients. The objective of this project was to establish experimental models for investigating this interaction. In particular, potential of perceptual and acoustic approaches were examined. The overarching goal of this research is to develop a clinical tool for assessment of intelligibility in dysphonic speech and treatment approaches for improving the intelligibility deficit. Two speech perception experiments were conducted to determine the effect of background noise on intelligibility. The first study measured intelligibility with a transcription-based method in quiet and noise. The second study measured intelligibility with a rating-based method in three levels of noise. Correlation between these measurements was examined to evaluate their agreement. The results indicated that these measurements strongly correlate; however, their relationship with ratings of voice quality significantly differed. These findings indicate that both of these measures could be used to evaluate intelligibility of dysphonic speech; however, they are not equivalent measures. The acoustic studies were conducted for two purposes: 1) to examine utility of an existing clinical acoustic measure, cepstral peak prominence (CPP), for prediction of intelligibility deficit in dysphonic speech, and 2) to explore potential of a preclinical tool, the landmark-based speech analysis algorithm, for characterizing linguistic aspects of dysphonic speech. The results of the CPP study indicated that the measure only moderately predicts intelligibility, thus it cannot be used alone as an acoustic marker for intelligibility. Two studies were conducted with a landmark-based speech analysis program. The first study used the analysis to characterize normal adult speech with standard clinical speech material. Results of this study demonstrated the expression pattern of landmarks, acoustic markers of articulatory events, could be used as a blueprint for investigating disordered speech acoustics. The second study evaluated whether this analysis is capable of describing a difference between dysphonic and normal speech. Results of these studies suggested that landmark-based analysis an effective method for detecting dysphonic speech.
Suzanne Boyce, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Alessandro de Alarcon, M.D. M.P.H. (Committee Member)
Lisa Kelchner, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Siddarth Khosla, M.D. (Committee Member)
Marepalli Rao, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
134 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Ishikawa, K. (2017). Towards Development of Intelligibility Assessment for Dysphonic Speech [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1490351996395082

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ishikawa, Keiko. Towards Development of Intelligibility Assessment for Dysphonic Speech. 2017. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1490351996395082.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ishikawa, Keiko. "Towards Development of Intelligibility Assessment for Dysphonic Speech." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1490351996395082

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)