A Revised List for the Estimation of Dysarthric Single Word Intelligibility

Abstract

An item analysis of the 160 words used in Tikofsky and Tikofsky’s (1964) study of dysarthric intelligibility was carried out. Results of the analysis yield a 50-word list with 9 difficulty levels ranging from 0.400 to 0.800 (0.05 interval width) and minimum reliability of 0.550. The average difficulty of the items selected is 0.619, with an average variance of 0.222 and average SD of 0.472. Degree of agreement among listeners for the 50-word list was determined by Spearman Rank Correlation. The obtained r s was 0.99, significant beyond the 0.01 level. The revised list appears to have the potential of providing a clinically useful tool for estimating dysarthric single word intelligibility.