[Free sorting task of speech disorders by expert and non-expert listeners]

Understood the strategies underlying the perception of speech motor disorders (SMD) is useful for the management of people with this kind of disorders. Our hypothesis was that intelligibility of speech is a dramatic decision factor for the classification of speech production independently of the type of listeners. Two types of listeners: 15 experts (logopedists and phoniatricians), and 15 non experts (students in the field of heath care without any experience) participated at this study performing a free sorting task of 33 stimuli. The stimuli are a sentence readed by 13 control subjects and 20 subjects with a SMD of several kinds of etiologies. The methodology used for the analysis is the visualization of proximity trees by a sorting mathematical algorithm and the analysis of the free commentaries as a discourse. The results confirm that the degree of alteration of intelligibility is the main factor distributed in the sorts, but the reference to the "normality" is an other strong criteria and this notion is frequently associated with a description of the stimuli at a level of voice more than a level of speech. These results lead to a new hypothesis of a classification of perception of speech included a speech disorders, determined at an extremity by a comparison with a "prototype of normality" and at the other extremity by the characteristic of "intelligibility or understandibility" reinforcing some concepts of speech rehabilitation.