Title: "Iowa’s Legacy in Dysarthria Assessment: Extending a Foundational Diagnostic Approach within a Psychophysical Framework"

Speaker: Mili Kuruvilla-Dugdale, Ph.D

Building on the University of Iowa’s foundational contributions to the assessment of motor speech disorders, this talk advances a psychophysical framework to improve the auditory-perceptual assessment of dysarthria. Traditional scaling methods remain widely used despite well-recognized limitations, including poor listener reliability, task-related biases, and scales that inadequately capture the multidimensional nature of dysarthria or map onto meaningful physical units. A psychophysical approach addresses the scaling challenges by aligning perceptual judgments with appropriate continua and levels of measurement, enabling more reliable, valid, and interpretable estimates of speech performance. The talk will cover evidence from recent studies in the Speech Perception and Kinematics Lab demonstrating how scale fit, auditory training, and external anchors influence rater reliability and criterion and construct validity. Together, these findings illustrate how grounding perceptual assessment in psychophysical measurement principles can establish a more rigorous, standardized foundation for evaluating dysarthria in both research and clinical practice.

Attendees are encouraged to join in person in HSAB 2004. Seating is limited (first-come, first-served, ~50 seats), but the seminar will also be available via Zoom.