Skip to main content
The Egyptian Journal of Otolaryngology
Download PDF
  • Original article
  • Open access
  • Published:

Developing an Arabic speech intelligibility test for adolescents and adults

The Egyptian Journal of Otolaryngology volume 35, pages 86–91 (2019)Cite this article

Abstract

Objectives

The improvement of speech intelligibility of many patients is one of the primary aims of the therapy of communication disorders. The standard evaluations lack an Arabic test to measure speech intelligibility among adolescents and adults.

Participants and methods

This study was conducted on 200 participants with an age range from 12 to 60 years who can read Arabic. All participants were randomly selected from the outpatient clinic of phoniatrics from five speech disorders affecting speech intelligibility. Each participant included in the study was subjected to two evaluations: a subjective rating of the participant’s speech intelligibility and the developed Arabic speech intelligibility test, which is meant to be an objective measure.

Results

The results showed highly significant correlation between the scores of the Arabic speech intelligibility test and the average scores of the raters.

Conclusion

The developed test proved to be valid and reliable for measuring speech intelligibility and could be categorically classified into ranges of severity.

References

  1. Yorkston K, Strand E, Hume J. The relationship between motor function and speech function in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In: Cannito M, Yorkston KM, Beukelman DR, editors. Neuromotor speech disorders: nature, assessment, and management. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes 1998. pp. 85–98.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Monsen RB. The oral speech intelligibility of hearing – impaired talkers. J Speech Hear Res 1983 48:286–296.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Flipsen P Jr. Measuring the intelligibility of conversational speech in children. Clin Linguist Phon 2006; 20:202–312.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Monsen RB. A usable test for the speech intelligibility of deaf talkers. Am Ann Deaf 1981; 126:845–852.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Chin S, Finnegan K, Chung B. Relationships among types of speech intelligibility in pediatric users of cochlear implants. J Commun Disord 2001; 34:187–205.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. SPSS 15.0 Command Syntax Reference. Chicago, Illinois: SPSS Inc. 2006.

  7. Landis JR, Koch GG. The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics 1977; 33:159–174.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Monsen R, Moog JS, Geers AE. CID picture spine. Speech intelligibility evaluation. St Louis, MO: Central Institute for the Deaf; 1988.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Kent RD, Weismer G, Kent JF, Rosenbek JC. Toward phonetic intelligibility testing in dysarthria. J Speech Hear Res 1989; 54:482–499.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Schiavetti N. Scaling procedures for the measurement of speech intelligibility. In: Kent RD, editor. Intelligibility in speech disorders. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins 1992. pp. 11–34.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Boothroyd A, Nittrouer S. Mathematical treatment of context effects in phoneme and word recognition. J Acoust Soc Am 1988; 84:101–114.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Francis A, Nusbaum H. The effect of lexical complexity on intelligibility. Int J Speech Technol 1999; 3:15–25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Kewley-Port D, Burkle TZ, Lee JH. Contribution of consonant versus vowel information to sentence intelligibility for young normal-hearing and elderly hearing-impaired listeners. J Acoust Soc Am 2007; 122:2365–2375.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Beddor PS. (1983). Phonological effects of nasalization on vowel height: universal patterns. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Minnesota. Bloomington: Indian University Linguistics Club.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Anderson Gosselin P, Gagné JP. Older adults expend more listening effort than young adults recognizing speech in noise. J Speech Lang Hear Res 2011; 54:944–958.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Picou EM, Ricketts TA, Hornsby BWY. Visual cues and listening effort: individual variability. J Speech Lang Hear Res 2011; 54:1416–1430.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Nagle KF, Eadie TL. Listener effort for highly intelligible tracheoesophageal speech. J Commun Disord 2012; 45:235–245.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Otorhinolaryngology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Phoniatrics Unit of Phoniatrics, Egypt

    Mona A. Hegazi

  2. College of Medicine, Ain Shams Hospitals, 18 El-Zaitoun Station Street, Cairo, 31952, Egypt

    Ahmed Abdelhamid MD, Ph.D (Assistant Professor of Phoniatrics, Consultant of Phoniatrics)

  3. ENT Department, King Fahad Hospital of the University, AlKhobar, Saudi Arabia

    Ahmed Abdelhamid MD, Ph.D (Assistant Professor of Phoniatrics, Consultant of Phoniatrics)

  4. ENT Department, College of Medicine, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IAU), Dammam, Saudi Arabia

    Ahmed Abdelhamid MD, Ph.D (Assistant Professor of Phoniatrics, Consultant of Phoniatrics)

Authors
  1. Mona A. Hegazi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Ahmed Abdelhamid MD, Ph.D
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ahmed Abdelhamid MD, Ph.D.

Additional information

This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.

Rights and permissions

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Hegazi, M.A., Abdelhamid, A. Developing an Arabic speech intelligibility test for adolescents and adults. Egypt J Otolaryngol 35, 86–91 (2019). https://doi.org/10.4103/ejo.ejo_2_18

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.4103/ejo.ejo_2_18

Keywords