The role of Swedish tonal word accents in children with language impairment

Abstract

The present study was designed to examine the production of the Swedish tonal accents in children with language impairment and normal controls in order to verify previous findings. The productions of 25 children with linguistic impairment and their matched controls, aged 4;4–10;0 (mean age 5;11) were evaluated by ratings of fundamental frequency patterns, and by perceptual analysis by ten linguistically naive listeners to assess the distinctiveness of the accents. These methods give a more detailed description of the children's productions of tonal word accents. The results show that 60.8% of the children with language impairment have difficulties to produce the contrast of tonal word accents according to the F0 patterns. The difference in the rating of the F0 curves between the children with LI and their matched controls was significant. There is a significant positive correlation between the perceptual results and the F0‐rating, indicating that the better a child was perceived, the better his/her F0 production was rated. We conclude that the distinction between the tonal word accents is a difficult feature to acquire for Swedish children, which is shown both by acoustic and perceptual evaluations.