Project Title: Intelligibility Assessment in Dysarthria Principal Investigator: Raymond Kent, PhD This project includes studies of speech intelligibility and speech quality as they are affected by developmental disorders in children and neurodegenerative disorders in adults. Speech is an important and challenging developmental accomplishment because it is the fastest discrete motor performance in humans and is generally the preferred modality for language. A primary objective of this research is to relate specific communicative difficulties to various types of motor impairments and associated neural lesions. Acoustic measures specified for various speaking tasks (e.g., diadochokinesis, single-word production, conversation) are used for the quantitative assessment of speech intelligibility, voice quality, and prosody. Included in this research are studies of typically and atypically developing speech, with the objective of defining acoustic measures that have potential for identifying infants and children at risk for communication disorders. Work to date has refined acoustic measures suitable for the study of speech disorders in individuals from infancy through adulthood. The disorders under study include cerebral palsy, stroke, traumatic brain injury, and various neurodegenerative disorders. Lesion data are being assembled to test hypotheses of brain-behavior relationships in the development and maintenance of speech motor control. The investigation of speech in children also takes into account developmental processes related to changes in size and shape of the vocal tract, as determined in other research conducted in the Waisman Center MRDDRC.

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