Measuring the syntactic complexity of Sentence Intelligibility Test sentences
2020 Conference on Motor Speech Abstract
The Sentence Intelligibility Test (SIT; Yorkston, Beukelman & Tice, 1996) was created to provide a large corpus of sentences of differing lengths to measure sentence intelligibility for individuals with dysarthria. The SIT sentences are relatively low-context and range from 5 to 15 words in length; they were not designed to meet specific lexical or syntactic criteria. This study compares two methods of indexing syntactic complexity: a fine-grained method derived from research on writing in a second-language (SC) and the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score (FKRE). Pilot data on 30 sentences indicate more variability in syntactic complexity within sentences of the same length using SC than FKRE. In this study we will compare a larger, random selection of SIT sentences (N=220). Results will provide a simple way to characterize SIT and other elicitation stimuli for functional evaluations of comprehensibility.
Figure 1 Data, 5-15 word sentences