Journal of Speech Pathology & Therapy
Open Access

Audience response; Speech

Introduction

Speech sound disorders (SSD) in kids are speech production issues that lead to speech that deviates from listeners’ expectations, regardless of the underlying cause. As a result, the child’s speech may be less understandable, making it more challenging for others to comprehend what the youngster is saying. Reduced acceptability, or the sense that the child is speaking “differently,” may be another communication effect of an SSD. The social effects of an SSD, which may restrict the child’s access to education and social interaction, include both understandability and acceptance (Krueger, 2019). Acceptability has been extensively understudied in clinical studies on SSD, despite intelligibility receiving a lot of attention. For instance, there is no accepted method of determining if children’sIn the present study, we suggest a novel way of assessing acceptability, explore how acceptability relates to intelligibility, and investigate potential differences between trained clinicians’ assessments of acceptability, and those collected from other adults and from children.

Audience Response System

According to this definition, speech acceptability is put to the test when listeners’ focus is brought to phonetic elements that deviate sufficiently from their expectations to be detected [1]. In fact, some studies evaluate acceptability in relation to severity because of how closely this concept relates to “severity.”

No matter how it is defined, acceptability is unquestionably a concept that is highly influenced by the listener and the listener’s experience. Listeners can be assumed to compare what they hear to an internal standard of what they regard to be “normal” when asked to evaluate the level of “normalcy” in a speech sample. Naturally, this internal norm is arbitrary and is influenced by the experiences of the listeners [2].

On the other side, exposure to certain features may increase listeners’ sensitivity to them, leading to harsher evaluations. It has been suggested that this helps to explain instances where clinical specialists have judged slightly disturbed or even non-pathological speech more harshly than untrained listeners, such as in the assessment of adult dysarthria speech[3].

The nature of the speech material, the assessment method, and listener characteristics associated with factors other than experience with disordered speech are just a few examples of the many variables that differ between studies, making it challenging to pinpoint a general pattern in how clinical experience may affect listeners’ assessments of acceptability [4-5]. Witt and colleagues on the other hand, show a pattern in which teachers and parents of children with cleft palate are perceptive to signs of speech difficulty that untrained peers miss. As a result, it might be concluded that older listeners are more critical than younger ones [6]. Again, distinctions in the investigated speech material’s nature and assessment techniques make it challenging to pinpoint general trends in how listeners of various ages evaluate acceptability. It is certainly clinically useful to know to what extent clinical assessments of acceptability reflect listeners’ perceptions without clinical training and/or experience, despite the fact that possible differences between different listener groups’ assessments of acceptability may not be easily explained. Witt et al. (1996) contend that the inclusion of peer-reviewedAudience Response Systems (ARS) have been used in perceptual assessment of both natural and synthetic speech . Here, panels of listeners provide their assessment by striking a button – everyone using their own hand control or keyboard, while speech samples are being played continuously. The evaluation will focus on a certain feature of speech depending on the instructions provided. Intelligibility is the focus of the instruction “hit the button anytime you don’t understand,” whereas acceptability is the focus of the instruction “strike the button if you believe it sounds unusual [7].

Additionally, the ARS approach can be assumed to fit a wider audience of participants because it relies on relatively simple instructions and an intuitive response mechanism, as opposed to traditional approaches, which frequently use more complex instructions and require participants to translate their perceptual response into a verbal or numerical description [8]. However, it is still unknown if an ARSbased measure of acceptance is reliable and valid.

The speakers’ articulation skills and true ages. Although the youngsters who were being interviewed recognized the misarticulating of the letter /s/, they responded more strongly to samples showing more serious issues, such as glottal articulation [9]. Together, the findings show that listeners pick up on even minor speech errors in children with SSDs, regardless of the attitudes that are elicited. We do not, however, know how listeners’ opinions of acceptability relate to the level of speech proficiency in the sampled speech or to the level of intelligibility without systematic quantification [10].

As the foregoing has shown, acceptability is an aspect of how communication in children with SSDs is perceived by others that has received little research[11]. This is problematic since speech acceptability may be a good indicator of the social consequences of having an SSD because it may also show how difficult it is for listeners to understand speech signals.

The major goal of the current study is to assess the validity and reliability of an ARS-based measure of acceptance. We investigate congruence validity with respect to other outcome measures to which acceptability is thought to be related, namely speech production proficiency and intelligibility, and construct validity with respect to rating-based acceptability [12]. The relationship between an ARS-based measure of acceptability and an ARS-based assessment of feasibility is described as a secondary goal.

The discovery that disruptions of acceptability elicit reactions more frequently than unintelligibility reflects listeners’ expected behavior with regard to their impression of acceptability and intelligibility, supporting the potential of the ARS-based methodology to capture these dimensions [13]. Children with SSDs may not be as sensitive to traits suggesting speech problem as adult listeners are, as evidenced by the fact that kid participants responded to acceptability disturbances less frequently than SLPs and other adults. However, further research is needed to confirm that this isn’t a result of the kids’ attention wandering during the perceptual task.

1. Fengming Y, Jianbing W (2014) Biomarkers of inflammatory bowel disease. Dis Markers

Indexed at, Google Scholar, Croos Ref

2. Kinlay S, Egido J (2006) Inflammatory biomarkers in stable atherosclerosis. Am J Cardiol 98:2-8.

Indexed at, Google Scholar, Crossref

3. Catts HW (1993)The relationship between speech‐language impairments and reading disabilities. J Speech Hear Res 36:948-958.

Indexed at, Google Scholar, Crossref

4. Donner A, Koval JJ (1980) The estimation of interclass correlation in the analysis of family data. Biometrics 36:19-25.

Indexed at, Google Scholar

5. Egger M, Davey Smith G, Schneider M, Minder C(1997) Bias in meta analysis detected by a simple, graphical test. BMJ 315:629-34.

Indexed at, Google Scholar, Crossref

6. Fey ME, Cleave PL, Long SH. (1997) Two models of grammar facilitation in children with language impairments: phase 2. J Speech Lang Hear Res 40:5-19.

Indexed at, Google Scholar, Crossref

7. Goldstein H, Hockenburger EH. (1991) Significant progress in child language intervention: an 11 year retrospective. Res Dev Disabil 12:401-24.

Google Scholar, Crossref

8. Cathleen TR, Karen C, Lyndsey N (2021) Speech and language therapy in primary progressive aphasia: a critical review of current practice. Expert Rev Neurother 21: 419-430.

Indexed at, Google Scholar, Crossref

9. Chiaramonte R, Piero P, Michele V (2020) Speech rehabilitation in dysarthria after stroke: a systematic review of the studies. Eur J Phys Rehabil Med 56: 547-562.

Indexed at, Google Scholar, Crossref

10. Hannah R, Nan GW (2019) Speech and language therapy best practice for patients in prolonged disorders of consciousness: a modified Delphi study. Int J Lang Commun Disord 54: 841-854.

Indexed at, Google Scholar, Crossref

11. Boscardin C, Penuel W (2012) Exploring benefits of audience-response systems on learning: a review of the literature, Acad Psychiatry 36: 401-407.

Google Scholar, CrossRef

12. Riley E, Renteria F (2020) Are You Using EARS? Meaningful Application of Electronic Audience Response Systems, Nurse Edu 45:276.

Google Scholar, CrossRef

13. Salzer R (2018) Smartphones as audience response system for lectures and seminars Anal Bioanal Chem 410: 1609-1613.

Google Scholar, Crossref