The interaction between tone and intonation in Mandarin aphasics speech.

Abstract

This study addresses two issues: (1) the interaction of tone and intonation in Mandarin and (2) whether nonfluent aphasic patients show the same pattern of the interaction of these two prosodic features as normal speakers do. Both tone and intonation use pitch change at different phonological levels. Intonation is superimposed on a phrase or a sentence, which must affect the pitch change of tones. In order to examine the interaction of tone and intonation, the study focuses on Mandarin disyllabic words with tone 2-2 (rising) and tone 4-4 (falling) in declarative (falling intonation) and interrogative (rising intonation) forms. An acoustic analysis tests how the F0 of the rhyme is affected by the two prosodic features. The investigation involves two groups of Taiwan Mandarin speakers: normal people and aphasic patients. The previous studies have tested non-tonic language speakers and found that the Broca’s aphasia, a nonfluent aphasia subtype, usually shows motor speech disorder, which may cause the phonetic-motoric impairment. In order to provide findings from a tonic language, this study investigates whether aphasic patients of a tone language, Mandarin, show the similar dysprosodic features.