Listener attitudes toward speech supplementation strategies used by speakers with dysarthria

This study examined listener attitudes toward (1) habitual speech, (2) alphabet supplemented speech, (3) topic supplemented speech, and (4) clear speech produced by nine survivors of traumatic brain injury who had dysarthria at varying levels of severity. Four listener groups were used: (1) members of the general public, (2) speech-language pathologists, (3) allied health professionals, and (4) family members of survivors of brain injury. The listeners viewed videotape showing each speaker in four speaking conditions and ranked each according to the effectiveness and acceptability of the strategy. The results demonstrated that alphabet supplementation was the most preferred speaking strategy among the four conditions viewed. Negative correlations between the attitude rankings and speaker intelligibility scores for alphabet supplementation suggest that some listeners do not prefer the strategy that, in fact, produced the highest intelligibility scores.