청자의 듣기훈련이 말명료도와 듣기전략 사용에 미치는 영향: 경직형 마비말장애인을 대상으로

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify the effect of training listeners on understanding the speech of talkers with spastic dysarthria and using listening strategies(suprasegmental, linguistic and cognitive) to understand the dysarthric speech. Participants were two adult speakers with different severity of spastic dysarthria (i.e., mild, mild-to-moderate) and forty adult listeners, divided into two groups (N = 20 for each group), who have never communicated with dysarthric individuals. The speakers were asked to read target utterances in word and sentence levels, and the speech was recorded with a digital recorder. The listeners were asked to pay attention to hear the audio-recorded speech samples of each spastic dysarthric speaker, one group for the speaker with mild spastic dysarthria and the other group for the speakers with mild-to-moderate spastic dysarthria, and to write down what they heard to evaluate speech intelligibility. The speech intelligibility evaluation was conducted twice: once before listening training and once after the training, and the differences on speech intelligibility scores were compared. The listeners were also asked to answer a listening strategy survey in Likert scale after each of the evaluations. Listening training was given for about one hour after the first speech intelligibility evaluation and the survey. The completed surveys were scored, and the average scores of each category(suprasegmental, linguistic and cognitive) were compared to analyze whether the training changed the amount and category of the listening strategy used by the listeners The results of the study were as follows: First, speech intelligibility scores showed significant main effects between listening training, utterance types and speakers’ severity. In addition, there was a significant interaction effect between the utterance types and the speaker’s severity. The listeners could understand dysarthric speech better after listening training and. significant improvement of speech intelligibility was observed in word level for ‘mild’ speaker and in sentence level for ‘mild-to-moderate’ speaker. Second, listener’s listening strategy scores showed significant increase after listening training. Comparison of the average scores in listening strategy for utterance types and speaker’s severity did not show any significant difference. There was a significant main effect among the categories of listening strategy. A post-hoc test revealed that the listeners used cognitive strategy the most, followed by linguistic and suprasegmental strategies. Changes in the categories of listening strategy were negligible while changes in questions in each category existed before and after listening training. Increase in the listening strategy score implies that listeners could use listening strategies more actively through training . In addition, significant increase in speech intelligibility scores after the training shows that active application of listening strategies may help the listeners understand the speech of individuals with spastic dysarthria. The results of this research suggest that listening training can be helpful in improving communication between speakers with spastic dysarthria and everyday listeners. For the future study, more realistic communication situations, and the speech of different types of dysarthria can be used.