Repeat and rephrase: Assessing implementation of communication strategies in speakers with Parkinson's disease

When encountering challenging communicative situations, speakers with dysarthria are commonly advised to rephrase their sentences, avoiding jargon and using predictable words. However, there are no standard protocols for assessing this skill. The current study explores a short educational protocol focused on rephrasing complex sentences. There are two primary research questions: 1) what (if any) acoustic and lexical changes occur when speakers are prompted to rephrase sentences, and 2) can speakers with dysarthria increase their intelligibility when repeating or rephrasing a message? Speech samples were collected from eleven speakers with Parkinson’s disease. In a baseline condition, speakers read 29 sentences from the Natural Stories Corpus. Following this, speakers received verbal instructions on how to rephrase statements. In the rephrased condition, speakers were given the same stimuli and prompted to repeat the story using different words if desired. Preliminary results revealed statistically significant reductions in lexical diversity following the education protocol. Mean-segmented type-to-token (MSTTR) ratio was 7.57% lower in the rephrased condition, a difference which was significant at the p = 0.001 level. Although differences varied across participants, none showed increases from the original passage. Evaluations of speaking rate and intelligibility in the baseline and rephrased conditions will also be presented.