Perceptual aspects of cluttered speech.

UNLABELLED: The purpose of this descriptive investigation was to explore perceptual judgments of speech naturalness, compared to judgments of articulation, language, disfluency, and speaking rate, in the speech of two youths who differed in cluttering severity. Two groups of listeners, 48 from New York and 48 from West Virginia, judged 93 speaking samples on 9-point scales of two cluttering speakers tape recorded in an earlier study [St. Louis, K. O., Myers, F. L., Cassidy, L. J., Michael, A. J., Penrod, S. M., Litton, B. A., et al. (1996). Efficacy of delayed auditory feedback for treating cluttering: Two case studies. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 21, 305-314]. A counterbalanced design assigned each listener to listen to half of the total samples and to judge naturalness and two of the other four attributes (i.e., articulation and language or disfluency and rate). Among the five attributes, rate and naturalness were perceptually least acceptable for both clutterers followed by articulation. Disfluency and language were most acceptable, although different results for the various probe tasks were observed for the two cluttering subjects, one severe and the other, mild-moderate. Among other findings, the study highlights the multidimensionality of naturalness judgments.

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will be able to: (1) describe differences in perceptual judgments of cluttering; (2) summarize features that contribute to the multidimensionality of cluttering; and (3) describe sources of variability in group perceptual judgments of cluttered speech.