Goals

The goals of this project are to develop design specifications, develop prototype systems, and evaluate technologies that facilitate the comprehension of supplemented speech.

Progress to Date

The prototype has been developed. A project has been completed in which 7 speakers with very low intelligibility (15 to 20%) used to prototype to supplement their speech. With high levels of word prediction accuracy, the speech of these individuals was supplemented to be approximately 80-90% intelligible.

A second project evaluated the impact of alphabet supplementation (of various levels of completeness) on speech intelligibility. Specifically, four experimental conditions were utilized--all words supplemented, all word supplemented except nouns, all words supplemented except verbs, or all words supplemented except functor words. This study demonstrates that not all words in an utterance must be supplemented in order to achieve the supplementation effect.

Publications

Hanson, E., Yorkston, K., Beukelman, D. (2004). Speech Supplementation Techniques for Dysarthria: A Systematic Review, Journal of Medical Speech Language Pathology. 12, ix-xxix

Hanson, E.K. & Beukelman, D.R. (2006). Effect of omitted cues on alphabet supplemented speech intelligibility. Journal of Medical Speech-Language Pathology, 14(3), 185-196.

Hanson, E., Beukelman, D., Heidemann, J., & Shutts, E. (In preparation). Sentence intelligibility effects of alphabet supplementation and word prediction in a dual-display SGD prototype.

Presentations

Hanson, L., Beukelman, D., & McKee, K. (2006). Alphabet supplementation effects on sentence intelligibility with selected cues omitted. American Speech Language Hearing Association Convention.

Hanson, L. Beukelman, D., Kahl, J., Schutts, E. (2005). Effect of Alphabet Supplementation & Word Precision on Speech Intelligibility.

Hanson, E. & Beukelman, D. (2007). Are some letter cues more important than others in alphabet supplementation? Speech Motor Control Conference, Monterey, CA.