ICPLA 2023

Thea attended the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association meeting held at the University of Salzburg this past week to give a talk on the impact of prominence on speech intelligibility in Parkinson disease. This is more work from our ASH Foundation New Investigators Research Grant funded project on prominence!

Some take-aways from this work:

Q: Are listeners more accurate in identifying stop consonants in the speech of people with (and without) PD when the talker is trying to signal prominence?

A: Overall, no! We found a group effect (talkers with PD were less understood than controls), but no effect of prominence alone. However, listener accuracy was mediated by the prominence and voice onset time (VOT) differently in people with and without PD. Longer voiced VOTs for people with PD in the non-prominent condition made it *harder* for listeners to understand them, but *helped* listeners in prominent words.