EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Transforming assessment of speech in children with cleft palate via online crowdsourcing

Anne M Sescleifer, Caitlin A Francoisse, Janna C Webber, Jeffrey D Rector and Alexander Y Lin

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Objective: Speech intelligibility is fundamental to social interactions and a critical surgical outcome in patients with cleft palate. Online crowdsourcing is a burgeoning technology, with potential to mitigate the burden of limited accessibility to speech-language-pathologists (SLPs). This pilot study investigates the concordance of online crowdsourced evaluations of hypernasality with SLP ratings of children with cleft palate. Methods: Six audio-phrases each from children with cleft palate were assessed by online crowdsourcing using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), and compared to SLP’s gold-standard hypernasality score on the Pittsburgh Weighted Speech Score (PWSS). Phrases were presented to MTurk crowdsourced lay-raters to assess hypernasality on a Likert scale analogous to the PWSS. The survey included clickable reference audio samples for different levels of hypernasality. Results: 1,088 unique online crowdsourced speech ratings were collected on 16 sentences of 3 children with cleft palate aged 4–8 years, with audio averaging 6.5 years follow-up after cleft palate surgery. Patient 1 crowd-mean was 2.62 (SLP rated 2–3); Patient 2 crowd-mean 2.66 (SLP rated 3); and Patient 3 crowd-mean 1.76 (SLP rated 2). Rounded for consistency with PWSS scale, all patients matched SLP ratings. Different sentences had different accuracies compared to the SLP gold standard scores. Conclusion: Online crowdsourced ratings of hypernasal speech in children with cleft palate were concordant with SLP ratings, predicting SLP scores in all 3 patients. This novel technology has potential for translation in clinical speech assessments, and may serve as a valuable screening tool for non-experts to identify children requiring further assessment and intervention by a qualified speech language pathology expert.

Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0227686 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 27686&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0227686

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227686

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0227686