Why is prosody in speech-language pathology so difficult?

Peppé, Sue

doi:10.1080/17549500902906339

Cited by 90 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Diagnosis and treatment of impaired stress contrastivity in apraxia of speech, autism spectrum disorders, hearing loss, and aphasia is currently undertaken in the absence of a solid evidence base ( Peppé, 2009 ). What we do know about impaired lexical stress is primarily based on studies of English.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An acoustic investigation of the developmental trajectory of lexical stress contrastivity in Italian

Arciuli

Colombo

2016

Speech Communication

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We examined whether typically developing Italian children exhibit adult-like stress contrastivity for word productions elicited via a picture naming task (n=25 children aged 3–5 years and 27 adults). Stimuli were 10 trisyllabic Italian words; half began with a weak–strong (WS) pattern of lexical stress across the initial 2 syllables, as in patata, while the other half began with a strong–weak (SW) pattern, as in gomito. Word productions that were identified as correct via perceptual judgement were analysed acoustically. The initial 2 syllables of each correct word production were analysed in terms of the duration, peak intensity, and peak fundamental frequency of the vowels using a relative measure of contrast—the normalised pairwise variability index (PVI). Results across the majority of measures showed that children’s stress contrastivity was adult-like. However, the data revealed that children’s contrastivity for trisyllabic words beginning with a WS pattern was not adult-like regarding the PVI for vowel duration: children showed less contrastivity than adults. This effect appeared to be driven by differences in word-medial gemination between children and adults. Results are compared with data from a recent acoustic study of stress contrastivity in English speaking children and adults and discussed in relation to language-specific and physiological motor-speech constraints on production

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Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An acoustic investigation of the developmental trajectory of lexical stress contrastivity in Italian

Arciuli

Colombo

2016

Speech Communication

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“…Additionally, individual speakers have idiosyncratic variations; prosodic styles vary in their appropriateness; and many languages have regional prosodic varieties. All this makes it hard to determine prosody as typical or atypical (Peppé, 2009), the more so as prosodic phenomena are not well-defined and seldom explicitly discussed; but this has not prevented a sense that prosody can be wrong or unusual, as in the above-mentioned early characterisations of ASC and in lay perceptions of autistic speech.…”

Section: Atypical Prosodymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The prosody of verbal people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) has however not received a great deal of attention in research. There are several possible reasons why this should be, such as the variability of atypical prosody and the difficulty of assessing its communicative and social effects (Peppé, 2009). There are at least three reasons for investigating it: to find out how communication and social interaction in people who have the condition may be affected by deficits in prosodic skills; to establish the basis for possible techniques for intervention and improvement in aspects of communication in ASC; and to shed light on typical language development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expressive prosody in children with autism spectrum conditions

Peppé

Cleland

Gibbon

et al. 2011

Journal of Neurolinguistics

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a b s t r a c tThe expressive prosodic abilities of two groups of school-age children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC), Asperger's syndrome (AS) and high-functioning autism (HFA), were compared with those of typically-developing controls. The HFA group showed impairment relative to age-matched controls on all the prosody tasks assessed (affect, sentence-type, contrastive stress, phrasing and imitation) while the AS showed impairment only on phrasing and imitation. Compared with lexically-matched controls, impairment on several tasks (affect, contrastive stress and imitation) was found in the HFA group but little in the AS group (phrasing and imitation). Comparisons between the ASC groups showed considerable differences on prosody skills. Impairment in prosodic skills may therefore be a reliable indicator of autism spectrum subgroups, at least as far as communicative functioning is concerned. There were also significant differences between ASC groups and lexically-matched typically-developing children on expressive language skills, but the incomplete correlation of the prosody results with scores on language tasks suggests that the prosodic differences between the two groups may not all be attributable to the level of language skills. Suggested further research is to investigate the relationship of prosody and language skills in this population more closely, and to develop a prosody test as part of the diagnostic criteria of ASC.

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“…For example, several studies using the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children (PEPS-C, Peppé & McCann, 2003), the most widely used standard measure of receptive and expressive prosodic skills in the ASD literature (Peppé, 2009), have concluded that children with ASD have difficulties interpreting pragmatic, affective and grammatical prosodic cues accurately (e.g., Peppé & McCann, 2003;Diehl & Paul, 2013). Our findings extend previous research by showing that adults with ASD appear to have difficulties detecting syllable stress regardless of whether meaning is important for making the decision.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relations Among Detection of Syllable Stress, Speech Abnormalities, and Communicative Ability in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Kargas

López

Morris

et al. 2016

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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2 AbstractPurpose: To date the literature on perception of affective, pragmatic and grammatical prosody abilities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been sparse and contradictory. Interestingly, the primary perception of syllable stress within the word structure, which is crucial for all prosody functions, remains relatively unexplored in ASD. Thus, the current study explored syllable stress perception sensitivity and its relation to speech production abnormalities and communicative ability in adults with ASD.Method: A same-different syllable stress perception task using pairs of identical foursyllable words was delivered to 42 adults with/without high-functioning ASD, matched for age, to investigate primary speech perception ability in ASD. Speech production and communicative ability in ASD was measured using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule.Results: As predicted, the results showed that adults with ASD were less sensitive in making judgments about syllable stress relative to controls. Also, partial correlations revealed a key association of speech production abnormalities with stress perception sensitivity, rather than communicative ability per se.Conclusions: Our findings provide empirical evidence for deficits on primary syllable stress perception in ASD and its role on socio-communicative difficulties. This information could facilitate the development of effective interventions for speech and language therapy and social communication.

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Why is prosody in speech-language pathology so difficult?

Cited by 90 publications

References 51 publications

An acoustic investigation of the developmental trajectory of lexical stress contrastivity in Italian

An acoustic investigation of the developmental trajectory of lexical stress contrastivity in Italian

Expressive prosody in children with autism spectrum conditions

Relations Among Detection of Syllable Stress, Speech Abnormalities, and Communicative Ability in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders

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