Does clinical experience impact listeners’ perception of disordered speech?

Speaker-related variability associated with speech sound disorders (SSDs) can pose a challenge to accurate speech recognition. Listeners who have more experience with disordered speech, such as speech-language pathologists (SLPs), may have advantages in speech recognition compared to naive listeners, similar to perceptual adaptation findings with other unfamiliar variants (e.g., second language accents). However, there are conflicting findings regarding the experience benefit with SSD and few studies have examined how experience impacts intelligibility. Here, we test how clinical experience (i.e., clinical practicum hours) impacts listeners’ intelligibility ratings using visual analog scaling for typically developing (TD) and SSD talkers. Listeners included speech, language and hearing sciences undergraduate and graduate students (n = 43). Stimuli were simple sentences produced by six children (3–6 years of age) from the Speech Exemplar and Evaluation Database (SEED, Speights et al., 2020). TD talkers received similar intelligibility ratings, regardless of experience. For SSD speech, intelligibility ratings decreased with increased clinical experience. Though listeners had relatively little experience, results suggest clinical experience leads to increasingly stringent response criteria for evaluating disordered speech as typical or atypical. Future studies should include practicing SLPs with broader experience and specific clinical speciality areas (e.g., pediatric SSD versus adult cognition).