Rights Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License Intelligibility and acceptability measures of Cantonese dysarthric speech

The purpose of this study was to investigate sentence intelligibility in Cantonese-speaking adults with dysarthria. A Cantonese sentence intelligibility test was developed, based on the Assessment of Intelligibility of Dysarthric Speech (AIDS) (Yorkston & Beukelman, 1981). Ten speakers with dysarthria, 3 resulting from Parkinson's Diseases, 3 from CVA and 4 from head injury served as speaker subjects for the newly developed test. Six naive listeners served as judges. The intelligibility task involved orthographic transcription. In addition, each sample was rated for acceptability, using a 9-point scale. Sentence intelligibility ranged from 26 % to97%. There was considerable intra subject variation in intelligibility. There was a high correlation between intelligibility and acceptability measures (r = 0.86). However, several samples, which were highly intelligible, received poor acceptability ratings. The relationship between these two measures is discussed.