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From: Ryan Pollard
Date: 06 Oct 2008
Time: 10:14:21 -0500
Remote Name: 70.57.5.81
You bring up some good points. I agree, it does seem counterintuitive that there could be incongruity between subjective impressions of the device and objective speech performance. Nevertheless, that did occur with four of our subjects. Two subjects showed almost no fluency improvement during formulated speech, but reportedly benefited in more difficult-to-measure ways such as increased confidence. The fluency of two other subjects improved significantly, but they could not tolerate aspects of the device such as background noise. The following is a quote from one of those subjects. It may help you understand why, for some SpeechEasy users at least, increased fluency is sometimes not sufficient to “gladly put up with” perceived drawbacks of the device: “It was particularly not helpful in public places. I practically became deaf when people were speaking to me if the background noise was too loud… It does have its benefit at times, but really it’s just annoying.” I also agree with your comment about those “screwy” results indicating the possibility of unaccounted-for variables that may have influenced subjects’ overall opinions of the device. In fact, that’s exactly what we say in the discussion section of our JSLHR paper.