Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Master of Science

Program

Health and Rehabilitation Sciences

Supervisor

Dr. Allyson Dykstra

Abstract

Speech intelligibility of 10 individuals with OMD was measured before and after receiving BoNT-A injections. Intelligibility was assessed using the PIT (single-word intelligibility), SIT (sentence intelligibility), and a conversational speech task. Five listeners rated the speech intelligibility of these three intelligibility tasks via orthographic transcription and visual analogue scaling (VAS) techniques. BoNT-A was not associated with significant differences in speech intelligibility. Further analysis revealed a significant difference on the PIT VAS intelligibility ratings based on order of presentation, suggesting that listeners rated the first half of words on the PIT (words 1-29) as more intelligible than the second half of words (words 30-57). There was also a significant difference in SIT transcription intelligibility scores based on sentence length, suggesting that listeners rated shorter sentences with higher intelligibility than longer sentences. This research will contribute to a small body of literature on speech intelligibility in OMD.

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