Clinical study of a dysarthric adult using a touch talker with words strategy

To maintain the credibility of professionals prescribing often expensive communication aids with synthetic speech output, it is becoming increasingly important to establish objective procedures for evaluating the relative gains in intelligibility and efficiency from these systems over natural speech. It is also critical to evaluate the use of the communication aid at the end of training. This descriptive study evaluated the intelligibility of a severely dysarthric speaker's natural speech versus a Touch Talker with (1) an internal Echo speech synthesizer and (2) an external DECtalk. The assessment was carried out using a contextualized and decontextualized procedure. Both showed poor intelligibility of the user's natural speech and considerable gains in intelligibility from the use of the two synthetic speech systems. Access to the system using direct selection was slow.For 1 year and 9 months, training was provided in the use of (1) a Touch Talker with Words Strategy, (2) a word processing package with w...