Rhythm in the speech of a person with right hemisphere damage: Applying the pairwise variability index

Abstract

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. shown that speakers with RHD may have difficulties with intonation production, and therefore it was hypothesised that there may also be rhythmic disturbance. Results show that the neurologically normal control uses a similar rhythm to that reported for British English (there are no previous studies available for Australian English), whilst the speaker with RHD produces speech with a less strongly stress-timed rhythm. This finding was statistically significant for the intervocalic intervals measured (t(8)=4.7, p<0.01), and suggests that some aspects of prosody may be right lateralised for this speaker. The findings are discussed in relation to previous findings of dysprosody in RHD populations, and in relation to syllable-timed speech of people with other neurological conditions. Permanent repository link

Word-level prosodic measures and the differential diagnosis of apraxia of speech

“…The pairwise variability index (PVI) was originally conceptualized as the normalized duration difference between adjacent syllables in connected speech and used to characterize speech rhythm and stress in neurotypical speakers who use different languages and dialects (Low, Grabe, & Nolan, 2000). Direct application to running speech has been possible for communication disorders that do not primarily affect linguistic fluency (Knight & Cocks, 2007; Maruthy, Venugopal, & Parakh, 2017) and, when modified for comparisons at the word level, the PVI has contributed to research addressing lexical stress development in children (Arciuli & Ballard, 2017; Arciuli & Colombo, 2016; Ballard, Djaja, Arciuli, James, & van Doorn, 2012) and the differentiation between AOS and aphasia (APH).…”

Assessing the temporal reliability of rhythm metrics

“…These include: a comparison of the rhythm of different varieties within a language (Low et al 2000, Spencelayh 2001, Ferragne & Pellegrino 2004, White & Mattys 2007b), an examination of the rhythm of children acquiring two languages (Whitworth 2002) and of the influence of bilinguals’ languages on each other (White & Mattys 2007a), and a comparison of the rhythm used by people with clinical diagnoses to that of non-impaired controls (e.g. Henrich et al 2006, Knight & Cocks 2007, Liss et al 2009). These studies can also be seen as tests of validity as they investigate whether the metrics can distinguish between samples of speech where rhythm is perceived to differ, although they move away from capturing rhythmic distinctions between languages.…”