Perceptual Training for People With Parkinson's Disease

Peer support offers important benefits for people with Parkinson's disease (PD), helping to reduce social withdrawal and promote participation in daily life. Successful peer support relies on mutual intelligibility: Individuals with PD must be able to both understand and be understood by their peers, even when hypokinetic dysarthria is present. Although the speech production aspects of dysarthria in PD have been well studied, little is known about how people with PD perceive dysarthric speech. Perceptual training has been shown to improve neurotypical (NT) listeners' understanding of dysarthric speech; however, speech perception changes associated with PD may limit its effectiveness. This Phase 1 trial examined the therapeutic potential of a validated, listener-focused perceptual training protocol applied to individuals with PD.

Ninety-three participants across three listener groups, including adults with PD (n = 23), age-matched NT adults (n = 32), and younger NT adults (n = 38), completed a structured pretest-training-posttest paradigm using speech from a speaker with hypokinetic dysarthria secondary to PD. Intelligibility was operationalized as word recognition accuracy based on listener transcription performance before and after training.

All listener groups demonstrated significant improvements in intelligibility following perceptual training. Moreover, the magnitude of improvement for listeners with PD was statistically comparable to both NT groups.

These findings challenge assumptions about impaired perceptual learning in PD and demonstrate that listener-focused training can be successfully extended to people with PD. This has important clinical implications for enhancing communication and, by extension, peer support within PD communities.