Effects of contextual prosodic patterns on the auditory comprehension of normally stressed targets

Abstract

Reports indicate that neurologically normal subjects produce faster reaction times to phoneme targets when the context preceding the targets is produced with a stressed versus normally stressed prosodic pattern. The effects of contextual prosodic patterns on the auditory comprehension of normally stressed targets by aphasic listeners were investigated. Target words were computer edited out of paragraph‐length stimuli that had been produced with emphatic stress and with normal stress. The target words were then replaced with normally stressed cognates. Analysis revealed that aphasic auditory comprehension was better when the context surrounding the target words had been produced with an emphatically stressed rather than a normally stressed prosodic pattern. Acoustic analyses of the emphatically stressed and normally stressed stimuli revealed differences in duration but not peak fundamental frequency of words preceding target words. [Work supported by NICHD Core Grant ♯ 5 P30 HD03352 to Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison.]