Crowdsourcing can be a cheap, unbiased way to determine if patients with speech disorders are pronouncing sounds correctly, report researchers.
“Because large crowdsourced samples can be obtained quickly, easily, and inexpensively, speech researchers could find it beneficial to use crowdsourcing technology in place of traditional methods of collecting speech ratings,” said lead author Tara McAllister Byun, an assistant professor in New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Research in linguistics and psychology has reported that using crowdsourcing not only saves time and money, but can also enhance scientific rigor.
The study, published in the Journal of Communication Disorders, suggests that these benefits can also be extended to studies of the nature and treatment of speech disorders.
In speech disorders research, unbiased listeners are needed to evaluate patients’ progress over the course of treatment by listening to speech sounds and rating or coding them.
Because speech language pathologists and other trained professionals are often used as raters, collecting the ratings can be costly. It can also be a challenge to find raters who are not part of the research and are therefore unbiased.
