Dysarthria, a motor speech disorder, is often treated as a problem of intelligibility. However, individuals with dysarthria have reported reduced communicative effectiveness even when their speech remains intelligible (Dykstra et al., 2015). Recent research has shown that listeners experience greater cognitive effort when processing dysarthric speech (Fletcher et al., 2022; Hirsch et al., 2025), highlighting that intelligibility alone may not capture the listener’s experience. This study challenges the assumption that intelligibility alone ensures communicative success by investigating the acoustic correlates to emotional perception and listener affect in dysarthric speech. Speech samples from 32 speakers with varying types of dysarthria were acoustically analyzed and presented to 50 naïve listeners. After hearing each sample, listeners rated speech intelligibility, pleasantness, and animation and their own comfort, frustration, and fatigue while listening. Correlation analysis showed medium to large associations between scales, supporting the conclusion that listeners form global impressions that integrate both intelligibility and emotion. Among the acoustic measures examined, articulation rate, speech rate, and F2 slope emerged as the most consistent and robust predictors of ratings across scales. Overall, the convergence of listener ratings and their shared acoustic predictors suggests that intelligibility, emotion, and listener affect are not perceptually independent in dysarthric speech.
Morgan Robertson, Annalise R. Fletcher, S. Borrie· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
Degraded speech increases listening effort at the expense of memory encoding, but the flexibility of this resource trade-off under varying motivational conditions remains poorly understood. The present study investigated how encoding intention influences cognitive resource allocation during a speech-in-noise task. Participants' sentence comprehension was tested using a sentence verification task (SVT) under varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Memory of the sentences was then assessed by a recognition task about which they were either naïve or forewarned. Accuracy in the SVT and memory task represent comprehension and recognition, respectively. Reaction time in the SVT serves as a proxy for listening effort. Increasing noise impaired both comprehension and recognition and required greater listening effort. Forewarning imposed an additional listening effort cost to comprehension, consistent with encoding intention functioning as an upfront cognitive investment. However, noise and forewarning each imposed independent, additive penalties in both comprehension and listening effort rather than a compounding interaction, and gains in recognition were minimal. These findings suggest that intentional encoding does not fundamentally alter the comprehension-memory trade-off during effortful listening. Implications for finite resource models and their assumptions about how motivational and perceptual demands compete for cognitive resources are discussed.
Morgan Robertson, Kaitlin L. Lansford, L. Eijk et al.· Memory & Cognition· 0 citations
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