Perceived attention allocation of listeners who transcribe the speech of speakers with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

The purpose of this study was to investigate the self-perceived attention allocation of listeners as they transcribed the speech samples of speakers with mild to severe dysarthria as a result of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Listeners reported that their perceived attention allocation increased consistently as speech intelligibility for sentences decreased from 100% to 75%. In this study, self-perceptions of attention allocation peaked between 75% and 80% intelligibility. These results support the conclusion that listeners experience a considerable perceptual load as they attempt to comprehend the messages of persons whose speech has relatively high intelligibility but distorted due to dysarthria.