Clinical study of a dysarthric adult using a touch talker with words strategy

ISSN： 0743-4618

Source： Augmentative & Alternative Communication, Vol.7, Iss.4, 1991-01, pp. : 266-274

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Abstract

To maintain the credibility of professionals prescribing often expensive communication aids with synthetic speech output, it is becoming increasingly important to establish objective procedures for evaluating the relative gains in intelligibility and efficiency from these systems over natural speech. It is also critical to evaluate the use of the communication aid at the end of training. This descriptive study evaluated the intelligibility of a severely dysarthric speaker's natural speech versus a Touch Talker with (1) an internal Echo speech synthesizer and (2) an external DECtalk. The assessment was carried out using a contextualized and decontextualized procedure. Both showed poor intelligibility of the user's natural speech and considerable gains in intelligibility from the use of the two synthetic speech systems. Access to the system using direct selection was slow.For 1 year and 9 months, training was provided in the use of (1) a Touch Talker with Words Strategy, (2) a word processing package with word prediction capabilities, and (3) spelling and conversational strategies. At the end of the training period, the efficiency of communication was assessed. Fifteen-minute video-taped sessions of the user communicating with familiar (FP) and unfamiliar (UFP) partners provided the data for this evaluation. In a conversational situation, the user preferred natural speech with both UPS and UFPs. Using natural speech, he produced many more utterances at a faster rate to the FP than to the UFP. In the conversation with the FP more conversational breakdowns occurred: these were rectified by a strategy in which the FP used a high frequency of repetitions. We conclude that, while synthetic speech provided considerable gains in intelligibility, communication efficiency was not notably enhanced. This was possibly due to a variety of factors, including slow rate of access, poor memorization of the Minspeak encoding system, and a habitual preference for the use of his natural speech especially with familiar partners.