The Impact of Musical Training on Understanding Dysarthric Speech: A Preliminary Study of Transcription Errors

A growing literature highlights the need to develop communication partner-based interventions for individuals with dysarthria. Identifying listener characteristics that facilitate speech understanding is a necessary step in designing communication partner interventions. Musicianship enhances speech understanding in adverse listening conditions such as speech-in-noise. This preliminary investigation explored whether this advantage translated to understanding dysarthric speech. Adult listeners with and without musical training experience transcribed dysarthric speech productions. Phoneme intelligibility, word intelligibility, and the type of transcription errors (insertion, substitution, deletion) were compared between the listener groups. Although no differences were observed for overall phoneme and word transcription scores, a significant interaction between listener group and transcription error type was observed. This finding suggests the potential for distinct listening strategies and abilities between listeners with and without musical training experience. These preliminary results support larger scale efforts to investigate the elements of musical training that can be leveraged to develop listener-based interventions.