Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis (“TOPsy”): Psychometric Validation of a Brief Scalable Test of Lexical Stress Perception

Abstract

Prosody perception is fundamental to spoken language communication as it supports comprehension, pragmatics, morphosyntactic parsing of speech streams, and phonological awareness. A particular aspect of prosody: perceptual sensitivity to speech rhythm patterns in words (i.e., lexical stress sensitivity), is also a robust predictor of reading skills, though it has received much less attention than phonological awareness in the literature. Given the importance of prosody and reading in educational outcomes, reliable and valid tools are needed to conduct large-scale health and genetic investigations of individual differences in prosody, as groundwork for investigating the biological underpinnings of the relationship between prosody and reading. Motivated by this need, we present the Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis (“TOPsy”) and highlight its merits as a phenotyping tool to measure lexical stress sensitivity in as little as 10 min, in scalable internet-based cohorts. In this 28-item speech rhythm perception test [modeled after the stress identification test from Wade-Woolley (2016)], participants listen to multi-syllabic spoken words and are asked to identify lexical stress patterns. Psychometric analyses in a large internet-based sample shows excellent reliability, and predictive validity for self-reported difficulties with speech-language, reading, and musical beat synchronization. Further, items loaded onto two distinct factors corresponding to initially stressed vs. non-initially stressed words. These results are consistent with previous reports that speech rhythm perception abilities correlate with musical rhythm sensitivity and speech-language/reading skills, and are implicated in reading disorders (e.g., dyslexia). We conclude that TOPsy can serve as a useful tool for studying prosodic perception at large scales in a variety of different settings, and importantly can act as a validated brief phenotype for future investigations of the genetic architecture of prosodic perception, and its relationship to educational outcomes.

Exploring the genetics of rhythmic perception and musical engagement in the Vanderbilt Online Musicality Study

“…46 Participants first completed a brief musical engagement questionnaire, followed by a brief headphone test in which participants heard sounds of different volumes (used in sensitivity analyses), two auditory tasks (musical rhythmic perception and speech perception), and the demographic questionnaire. The speech perception test was included as a part of a separate investigation 47 and is not discussed further (see Supporting Material). The order of presentation for the rhythmic perception and speech perception tasks was counterbalanced in an alternating manner.…”

How do headphone checks impact perception data?

“…A headphone check will usually filter out participants with low attention, low effort, or poor listening environments, but other types of checks for accuracy or attention will also filter out such participants. Some studies which use headphone checks also use additional checks for attention or audio quality, such as excluding participants with low accuracy on clear items (Brown et al, 2018;Mills, Shorey, Theodore, & Stilp, 2022;Saltzman & Myers, 2021) or inaccurate responses for catch trials that instruct them to provide a specific response (Brekelmans, Lavan, Saito, Clayards, & Wonnacott, 2022;Nayak et al, 2022;Seow & Hauser, 2022). Including multiple types of checks makes it difficult to evaluate which one(s) were most valuable in filtering out participants with low attention or poor listening environments and not filtering out additional participants.…”

“…Some studies include checks to ensure attention and ability to hear the audio stimuli without including a headphone check (Denby & Goldrick, 2021;D'Onofrio, 2018;Getz & Toscano, 2021). Another approach is to include post-task questions for participants to self-report whether they were paying attention to the task, encountered technical difficulties, and/or felt their data was usable (Beier & Ferreira, 2022;Nayak et al, 2022). All of these methods are likely to filter out unusable data.…”

“…The dichotic loudness test presented by Woods et al (2017) is used in many experiments (e.g., Krumbiegel, Ufer, & Blank, 2022;Lavan, Knight, Hazan, & McGettigan, 2019;McPherson et al, 2022;Mepham, Bi, & Mattys, 2022;Merritt & Bent, 2022;Mills et al, 2022;Nayak et al, 2022;Saltzman & Myers, 2021;A. C. L. Yu, 2022).…”

“…Yu, Schertz, & Johnson, 2022). Some studies describe the headphone check as ensuring better audio conditions by improving the sound quality and decreasing back ground noise (e.g., Brown et al, 2018;Geller et al, 2021;McPherson et al, 2022;Nayak et al, 2022;Seow & Hauser, 2022). Both of the studies which provide the commonly-used headphone check methods primarily describe attenuation of environmental noise as the way that headphones are likely to improve audio conditions (Milne et al, 2021;Woods et al, 2017).…”