Poster for our presentation at the 2022 Motor Speech conference in Charleston, SC.
Speech perception is a probabilistic process, integrating bottom-up and top-down sources of information, and the frequency or structure of a word can predict how well it is perceived. Therefore, instead of asking how intelligible speakers are, it is also important to ask how intelligible individual words are. For this study, we measured the intelligibility of 165 children between 30 and 47 months in age on 38 different words and asked how words varied in intelligibility and whether word-level characteristics (frequency, phonotactic probability, motor complexity) predicted intelligibility. An item-response analysis showed that there was considerable variation in individual words with a reliable effect of frequency such that higher frequency words were more intelligible.
Tristan Mahr worked on this project while employed by the UW-Madison Waisman Center. He has no relevant nonfinancial relationships to disclose.
Katherine Hustad received a research grant from the NIH to collect these data. She has no relevant nonfinancial relationships to disclose.