A Pilot Study of Listening Fatigue: Impacts of Pediatric Dysarthria on Adult Listeners.

Purpose: We sought to characterize fatigue of adults when listening to speech of children with cerebral palsy (CP).

Method: Fifty-seven children with CP (19 without dysarthria and 38 with dysarthria) produced single-word and multiword speech samples. One hundred fourteen adult listeners completed transcription intelligibility tasks and provided listening fatigue ratings. Multiword utterances were analyzed in terms of speech rate and communication efficiency.

Results: Intraclass correlations showed large individual differences for listening fatigue ratings. Pearson correlations showed negative relationships between listening fatigue and intelligibility; however, the magnitude varied depending upon utterance length and dysarthria status of child speakers. Pearson correlations between listening fatigue and speech rate and between listening fatigue and communication efficiency varied depending upon dysarthria status of child speakers. Welch's t test showed that listeners of children with dysarthria had higher fatigue ratings than listeners of children without dysarthria. Listeners of children with dysarthria were more fatigued following multiword utterances than single-word utterances. Best subset regression showed that the combined effect of dysarthria status, intelligibility, and speech rate best explained listening fatigue of adult listeners.

Conclusions: Listeners had increased levels of fatigue when they heard dysarthric speech relative to nondysarthric speech. The needs of both speaker and listener should be considered when supporting children with CP and dysarthria to achieve successful communication.