Degree
Master of Science
Program
Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
Supervisor
Dr. Scott Adams
Abstract
This study investigated the effect of multi-talker background noise on speech intelligibility in participants with hypophonia due to Parkinson’s disease (PD). Ten individuals with PD and 10 geriatric controls were tested on four speech intelligibility tasks at the single word, sentence, and conversation level in various conditions of background noise. Listeners assessed speech intelligibility using word identification or orthographic transcription procedures. Results revealed non-significant differences between groups when intelligibility was assessed in no background noise. PD speech intelligibility decreased significantly relative to controls in the presence of background noise. A phonetic error analysis revealed a distinct error profile for PD speech in background noise. The four most frequent phonetic errors were glottal-null, consonant-null in final position, stop place of articulation, and initial position cluster-singleton. The results demonstrate that individuals with PD have significant and distinctive deficits in speech intelligibility and phonetic errors in the presence of background noise.
Recommended Citation
Leszcz, Talia M., "The effect of multitalker background noise on speech intelligibility in Parkinson's disease and controls" (2012). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 628.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/628
Included in
Other Rehabilitation and Therapy Commons, Speech and Hearing Science Commons, Speech Pathology and Audiology Commons