What role does intelligibility play in the assessment of AOS?

• A. It is a key outcome measure reflecting overall communicative effectiveness, influenced by articulation accuracy, rate, and prosody, especially on longer utterances.
• B. It is a measure of hearing sensitivity only.
• C. It is not used in AOS assessment.
• D. It is determined solely by vocabulary size.

Answer: (A)

Intelligibility is about how well a listener can understand a speaker’s utterances. In assessing AOS, it serves as a primary functional measure of how the speech impairment affects real communication, not just how the speech sounds in isolation. It reflects the combined impact of articulation accuracy, speech rate, and prosody on understanding, and it’s particularly sensitive when speakers produce longer utterances where planning and sequencing demands reveal more breakdowns. This makes intelligibility a key indicator of how severe the disorder is in everyday communication and how well someone might respond to treatment.

Hearing sensitivity isn’t what intelligibility measures by itself; a person could hear well but still be difficult to understand if production is impaired. And vocabulary size doesn’t determine how understandable speech is—the issue is how the speech sounds when produced, not how many words someone knows.