Use of prosody by children with severe dysarthria: A Cantonese extension study

Abstract

Several recent studies have shown that speakers with severe dysarthria can make use of prosody to communicate intentions. Patel and Salata (2006) investigated the abilities of five children with severe dysarthria to convey three pitch levels and three duration lengths to their caregivers, using an interactive computer game. In this extension study, four Cantonese-speaking children with severe dysarthria were asked to produce five durations and five pitch levels. Rising and falling pitch levels were included to simulate the rising and falling lexical tones of Cantonese. Acoustic analysis was performed for all productions to determine the relationship between acoustic cues and listener perception. There was substantial interparticipant and intraparticipant variability in the children's productions and in caregiver accuracy. However, accuracy was above chance level for a number of prosodic targets for each speaker. Some of the perceptual responses could be easily explained by the acoustic data, where clear distinctions were apparent. However, in other cases there was much overlap in the acoustic signal, suggesting that listeners were employing additional cues. The results of this study strengthen previous findings that prosody can be used reliably by speakers with severe dysarthria to communicate with familiar partners. Further cross-linguistic studies would be informative. Copyright © 2008 Delmar Cengage Learning.