Katie Gore, John’s wife, swung by the Table XI office today.  She is getting a masters in speech pathology at Northwestern and as part of her studies needs guinea pigs on which to perform “Oral Mechanism Exams”.

Part of the exam includes measuring diadochokinetic rates.  This is a measurement of how fast one can articulate distinct sounds like “puh”, “tuh”, “kuh” and the combination of the three.

Being the overachieving, competitive bunch that we are, we wanted to know how we stacked up. Here’s Katie’s reply:

Here are the “results”:

I have tallied them into a total raw score to make it obvious who did “the best” for your competitive ranking purposes.    Clinically you would never combine the scores, as it would be meaningless– it’s meant to give you a picture of an individual’s abilities with a specific articulatory parameter, which may be completely independent from their ability with a different parameter (e.g. in a young child, they may have excellent production of “tuh” but be completely incapable of pronouncing “kuh” sounds).  I just added them up (your per-second rate for “puh” + “tuh” + “kuh” + “puh-tuh-kuh”) for a “for fun” overall picture.

The unit being measured is “articulatory movements” per second (??? like I said, I made this up, you would never average it…but I guess that’s as good a term as any)

1. Samantha: 7.4/sec
2. Erik: 6.1/sec
3. John: 6.0/sec
4. Jordan: 5.6/sec
5. Matt: 4.8/sec
6. Greg: 4.6/sec

The only thing I might clinically derive from this is that if Table XI was having some sort of speed-tongue-twister competition, my money would be on Samantha.

Also it might be worth mentioning that in many areas of speech, girls perform better than boys.  So really she just had an unfair advantage.