Prosodic abilities of Spanish-speaking adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome

Martínez‐Castilla, Pastora; Sotillo, Marı́a; Campos, Ruth

doi:10.1080/01690965.2010.504058

Cited by 12 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Compared to CA-matched TD peers, children with WS also have difficulty discriminating and reproducing the parameters involved in the former prosodic skills (Stojanovik et al, 2007). Similar results have been found in adolescents and adults with WS (Martínez-Castilla, Sotillo, & Campos, 2011) who, in turn, exhibit problems understanding lexical stress (Plesa-Skwerer et al, 2007). In general, when mental age is taken into account, prosodic impairments are no longer apparent (Martínez-Castilla et al, 2011; Plesa-Skwerer et al, 2007; Stojanovik et al, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Enhanced linguistic prosodic skills in musically trained individuals with Williams syndrome

2019

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Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) present prosodic impairments. They are also interested in musical activities. In typical development, a body of research has shown that the linguistic prosodic skills of musically trained individuals are enhanced. However, it is not known whether, in WS, musical training is also associated with enhanced prosodic performance, a question this study sought to answer. We compared the performance on linguistic prosodic tasks among seven musically trained and fourteen musically untrained individuals with WS, and typically developing peers. Among those with WS, musically trained participants outperformed their musically untrained counterparts on the perception of acoustic parameters involved in prosody, the understanding of questioning and declarative intonation, and the comprehension of prefinal contrastive stress. The results suggest that musical training facilitates prosodic performance in WS. Our findings also suggest common processing mechanisms for acoustic parameters involved in both prosody and music, and that positive music-to-language transfer effects could take place in WS. We discuss the implications of these results for intervention purposes.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Enhanced linguistic prosodic skills in musically trained individuals with Williams syndrome

2019

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“…To fulfill such an aim, prosody assessment procedures appropriate for use with individuals with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities need to be employed. The Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C) test has proved to be successful in this respect [12,13]. PEPS-C follows a psycholinguistic approach by assessing both the skills needed to understand and express prosodic functions and those required to discriminate and imitate prosodic forms [14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Assessment of Prosodic Quality in Down Syndrome: Analysis of the Impact of Speaker Heterogeneity

et al. 2019

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Prosody is a fundamental speech element responsible for communicative functions such as intonation, accent and phrasing, and prosodic impairments of individuals with intellectual disabilities reduce their communication skills. Yet, technological resources have paid little attention to prosody. This study aims to develop an automatic classifier to predict the prosodic quality of utterances produced by individuals with Down syndrome, and to analyse how inter-individual heterogeneity affects assessment results. A therapist and an expert in prosody judged the prosodic appropriateness of a corpus of Down syndrome' utterances collected through a video game. The judgments of the expert were used to train an automatic classifier that predicts prosodic quality by using a set of fundamental frequency, duration and intensity features. The classifier accuracy was 79.3% and its true positive rate 89.9%. We analyzed how informative each of the features was for the assessment and studied relationships between participants' developmental level and results: interspeaker variability conditioned the relative weight of prosodic features for automatic classification and participants' developmental level was related to the prosodic quality of their productions. Therefore, since speaker variability is an intrinsic feature of individuals with Down syndrome, it should be considered to attain an effective automatic prosodic assessment system.

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“…Thus, children, adolescents and adults with WS perform worse than their TD peers of the same chronological age when they are required to discriminate pairs of prosodic contours based on pitch [62,66]. Similar results have been found when other parameters (e.g., length and loudness) are also involved in the prosodic contours to be discriminated [62,66].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…These tasks have been previously successfully used for the assessment of prosodic skills in individuals with WS [62,63,66]. In both tasks, the participants had to discriminate whether pairs of prosodic contours were the same or different.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pitch Processing in Children with Williams Syndrome: Relationships between Music and Prosody Skills

Martínez‐Castilla

Sotillo

2014

Brain Sciences

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Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder, has been taken as evidence that music and language constitute separate modules. This research focused on the linguistic component of prosody and aimed to assess whether relationships exist between the pitch processing mechanisms for music and prosody in WS. Children with WS and typically developing individuals were presented with a musical pitch and two prosody discrimination tasks. In the musical pitch discrimination task, participants were required to distinguish whether two musical tones were the same or different. The prosody discrimination tasks evaluated participants’ skills for discriminating pairs of prosodic contours based on pitch or pitch, loudness and length, jointly. In WS, musical pitch discrimination was significantly correlated with performance on the prosody task assessing the discrimination of prosodic contours based on pitch only. Furthermore, musical pitch discrimination skills predicted performance on the prosody task based on pitch, and this relationship was not better explained by chronological age, vocabulary or auditory memory. These results suggest that children with WS process pitch in music and prosody through shared mechanisms. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of cognitive modularity. The implications of these results for intervention programs for individuals with WS are also discussed.

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Prosodic abilities of Spanish-speaking adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome

Cited by 12 publications

References 76 publications

Enhanced linguistic prosodic skills in musically trained individuals with Williams syndrome

Enhanced linguistic prosodic skills in musically trained individuals with Williams syndrome

Automatic Assessment of Prosodic Quality in Down Syndrome: Analysis of the Impact of Speaker Heterogeneity

Pitch Processing in Children with Williams Syndrome: Relationships between Music and Prosody Skills

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