Relationship between Spontaneous Speech and Speech Made with Effort during Therapy by Individuals with Dysarthria

Abstract

The relationship between spontaneous speech in a natural setting and speech performed with the speaker applying his (or her) best effort in a speech therapy class was examined in 97 individuals with dysarthria. The results are outlined below:
1. Regardless of the type of dysarthria, type of treatment administered, or level of intelligibility, speech intelligibility invariably deteriorated more in an everyday setting than in a therapy session.
2. Individuals with flaccid, spastic, ataxic as well as UUMN dysarthria were all aware that the intelligibility of their speech deteriorates more in actual communication than in a therapy session.
3. Generally speaking, in both spontaneous speech and speech made with effort, the subjects were somewhat objectively conscious of the intelligibility of their speech.
4. No correlations were found between differences in intelligibility of the two speech types described above and MMSE, desire for continued speech therapy, satisfaction with the treatment, age, or the number of months spent in training. Also, there was no genderrelated difference.
Based on the results summarized above, we conducted a study on the clinical strategy needed for bringing the same level of speech made with effort in a therapy situation to spontaneous speech made in a real-life situation.