Assessing Perceptual Effects of Interactive Tasks

Assessing Perceptual Effects of Interactive Tasks

In this study, we will evaluate how solo, naive listeners perceive the speech of people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and age-matched speakers produced across interactive and non-interactive contexts with an unfamiliar, naive interlocutor.

Listeners will hear recorded speech of PALS and age-matched speakers and indicate what they heard. Recorded speech consists of vowels and consonants produced in non-interactive and interactive tasks. The perceptual judgements will be compared to see whether interactive contexts have similar perceptual effects across the two groups.

Plans for Assignment - This is a single group study in which all participants will engage in the same tasks.

Delivery of Intervention: Solo listeners will participate in this study in a remote, asynchronous format. They will be recruited using the online participant recruitment platform Prolific © and will use their own laptop/computer and headphones.

Adequacy of Sample size: We will use n = 1300 listeners to achieve 80% power at alpha of .05 to detect between group differences with the assumption of medium effect sizes (Cohen's f = 0.3).

Adequacy of Analyses: The proposed statistical analyses (Generalized mixed effects regressions) are standard and will be used to analyze the effect of the intervention on the outcome measures described below.

Inclusion Criteria:

• passing the remote hearing screening
• having no known speech, language or neurological disorders per self-report
• being a native monolingual speaker of American English
• having no experience communicating with people with dysarthria
• being between the ages of 18 and 65.

Exclusion Criteria:

• None - if volunteer meets the inclusion criteria, then they will be enrolled