Prosodic Task Research Articles

Prosodic skills in Spanish-speaking adolescents and young adults with Down syndrome.

Down syndrome (DS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder of genetic origin with a cognitive-behavioural profile that distinguishes it from other syndromes. Within this profile, language difficulties are particularly marked, having been more studied in childhood than in adulthood. More generally, there is a paucity of research on the prosodic skills of individuals with DS, despite the relevance of this linguistic component for effective communication. This study aimed to analyse, for the first time, the prosodic profile of Spanish-speaking teenagers and young adults with DS. We hypothesized that participants with DS would show significantly lower skills for the perception and production of prosodic functions and forms when compared to peers with intellectual disability (ID) of unknown origin. We also hypothesized that teenagers and young adults with DS would have better prosody perception than prosody production. The final sample included in the study comprised 28 Spanish-speaking teenagers and young adults with DS and 29 teenagers and young adults with other ID matched on chronological age and nonverbal cognition. Their prosodic skills were tested by means of the Profiling Elements of Prosody for Speech and Communication battery. This battery allows for the separate evaluation of the comprehension and expression of the communicative functions of prosody and the discrimination and production of the forms that carry out such functions. In the prosody function tasks, which are the most adaptive tasks for the communicative process, we found, as expected, significantly lower scores on the turn-end, chunking, and focus tasks in the group with DS. However, no significant between-group differences were found for the affect tasks. Participants with DS also had significantly lower scores on the prosodic form tasks than participants with other ID. The results of the comparison between prosodic perception and production skills showed that a generalization about a better profile in comprehension versus production is not possible and that there is a dependence on the demands of the prosodic task undertaken. The findings contribute to the ongoing development of the language profile of teenagers and young adults with DS and imply the need to design prosodic intervention programs based on their specific profile. What is already known on the subject Prosody is a fundamental element of language, and its mastery affects the effectiveness of communication. However, research on prosody in Down syndrome (DS) that offers a holistic view from a psycholinguistic approach is still scarce. To date, studies focused on providing a detailed profile of prosodic skills in individuals with DS have been mainly conducted with a few English-speaking children. These studies have shown that the comprehension and production of prosody is severely impaired, especially when considering affect and focus production, as well as the perception and production of prosodic forms. During childhood, greater efficacy is found in prosody comprehension than in prosody expression. What this study adds This is the first study analysing the prosodic profile of a large group of Spanish-speaking teenagers and young adults with DS. Poorer performance in the perception and production of both prosodic functions and forms was observed in participants with DS compared to participants with intellectual disability of unknown origin matched on chronological age and nonverbal cognition. Unlike what has been previously found in children, teenagers and young adults with DS performed at the same level as the control group on the understanding and expression of affect through prosodic cues. Results also showed that a generalization about a better prosody profile in comprehension versus production is not possible. What are the clinical implications of this work? This study provides new data on the prosodic skills of Spanish-speaking teenagers and young adults with DS. Given the impact of prosody on effective communication and the pattern of difficulties found in this study, speech and language therapists working with individuals with DS should consider including prosodic skills in interventions not only in childhood but also in adolescence and adulthood. Therefore, the prosodic profile of strengths and weaknesses in individuals with DS found in this research has direct implications for clinical practice.

Aging and the Perception of Affective and Linguistic Prosody.

Investigations of affective prosodic processing have demonstrated a decline with aging. It is unclear, however, whether this decline affects all or specific emotions. Also, little is known about the ability of syntactic resolution ambiguity with the use of prosody in aging. Twenty older (age range = 70-75) and 20 younger adults (age range = 20-25) performed an affective (happiness, neutrality, sadness, surprise, fear, and anger) and a linguistic (subject/object ambiguities) prosody task. Relative to young participants, older participants faced difficulty decoding affective prosody, particularly negative emotions, and syntactic prosody, in particular the subject reading condition. A marginally positive correlation was found between the affective and syntactic prosody tasks in the group of older individuals, but no gender differences in either prosodic task. The findings of the affective prosody task are discussed under the prism of the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, whereas general parsing strategies can account for the preference for the object reading condition.

Tailored perception: Individuals' speech and music perception strategies fit their perceptual abilities.

Perception involves integration of multiple dimensions that often serve overlapping, redundant functions, for example, pitch, duration, and amplitude in speech. Individuals tend to prioritize these dimensions differently (stable, individualized perceptual strategies), but the reason for this has remained unclear. Here we show that perceptual strategies relate to perceptual abilities. In a speech cue weighting experiment (trial N = 990), we first demonstrate that individuals with a severe deficit for pitch perception (congenital amusics; N = 11) categorize linguistic stimuli similarly to controls (N = 11) when the main distinguishing cue is duration, which they perceive normally. In contrast, in a prosodic task where pitch cues are the main distinguishing factor, we show that amusics place less importance on pitch and instead rely more on duration cues—even when pitch differences in the stimuli are large enough for amusics to discern. In a second experiment testing musical and prosodic phrase interpretation (N = 16 amusics; 15 controls), we found that relying on duration allowed amusics to overcome their pitch deficits to perceive speech and music successfully. We conclude that auditory signals, because of their redundant nature, are robust to impairments for specific dimensions, and that optimal speech and music perception strategies depend not only on invariant acoustic dimensions (the physical signal), but on perceptual dimensions whose precision varies across individuals. Computational models of speech perception (indeed, all types of perception involving redundant cues e.g., vision and touch) should therefore aim to account for the precision of perceptual dimensions and characterize individuals as well as groups.

How pitch change and final lengthening cue boundary perception in German: converging evidence from ERPs and prosodic judgements

ABSTRACTThis study examines the role of pitch and final lengthening in German intonation phrase boundary (IPB) perception. Since a prosody-related event-related potential (ERP) component termed Closure Positive Shift reflects the processing of major prosodic boundaries, we combined ERP and behavioural measures (i.e. a prosodic judgement task) to systematically test the impact of sole and combined cue occurrences on IPB perception. In two experiments we investigated whether adult listeners perceived an IPB in acoustically manipulated speech material that contained none, one, or two of the prosodic boundary cues. Both ERP and behavioural results suggest that pitch and final lengthening cues have to occur in combination to trigger IPB perception. Hence, the combination of behavioural and electrophysiological measures provides a comprehensive insight into prosodic boundary cue perception in German and leads to an argument in favour of interrelated cues from the frequency (i.e. pitch change) and the time (i.e. final lengthening) domain.

Decoding emotional prosody: Resolving differences in functional neuroanatomy from fMRI and lesion studies using TMS

Prosody conveys information about the emotional state and intention of others. Lesion studies have shown that damage to the right posterior temporal region is associated with prosody decoding deficits. Dissimilarly to findings from lesion studies, neuroimaging data show substantial bilateral peri-Sylvian activation. This study aimed to investigate the involvement of the left and right superior temporal gyrus (STG) in prosodic and semantic processing using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). These two regions of interest were chosen for their correspondence to Wernicke's area in the left hemisphere and its analog in the right. Offline TMS with a stimulation frequency of 1 Hz and intensity of 60% of stimulator output (approximately 1.1 Tesla) with one pulse applied per second for 10 minutes (600 pulses) was performed. Directly after TMS on the right STG, the left STG or sham-stimulation, participants completed a prosody decoding or a semantic judgment task (whether the tone/meaning was happy or sad). Reaction times (RT) for the prosodic task were significantly slower when TMS was applied in the right STG in comparison to left STG and sham conditions. TMS over both right and left STG delayed RT in the semantic task, significantly when the tone of voice was incongruent with the meaning. Our data strongly suggests that left temporal regions are not crucial to the basic task of prosody decoding per se; however, the analogous region on the right is. Hence, involvement of the left STG in prosodic decoding revealed in previous imaging data is incidental.

Acquisition of articulatory control for sentential focus in children

The present study examined articulator movement changes associated with the production of sentential focus in 4, 7 and 11-year-old children and adults. A facial capture system was used to track jaw, lower lip and upper lip movements while words were produced with and without focus in phrase-final and non-final positions. Adults produced focused words with significantly greater movement duration, displacement and velocity than unfocused words. Significant differences in duration, displacement and velocity between focused and unfocused productions were seen in the 7 and 11 year olds, although these results were not as consistent as those seen in the adults. Articulator movement differences between focused and unfocused words were seen in both the phrase-final and non-final positions in adults yet only in the phrase-final position in children. Findings suggest that children begin to modify articulator movement to mark sentential focus between 7 and 11 years of age and are likely to continue to refine movement patterns for this prosodic task throughout adolescence.

Once more with feeling: The effects of emotional prosody on hemispheric specialisation for linguistic processing

Speech perception requires a bilateral network of neural systems, with the left hemisphere specialised for linguistic processes including phonology, and the right hemisphere specialised for paralinguistic processes including emotional prosody. The present study used dichotic listening to determine how these two processing systems interact. Experiment 1 confirmed that the left hemisphere was specialised for the linguistic task, and the right hemisphere was specialised for the prosodic task. In Experiment 2, participants performed the linguistic task, but the words were spoken in prosodies that were neutral, happy, angry, or sad. Although the emotional prosody was irrelevant for the task, there was an attenuation of the typical right ear advantage when words were spoken with sad prosody, suggesting greater right hemisphere contributions to linguistic processing for sad speech. Similar effects were not observed with angry or happy prosody, suggesting that emotional prosody per se does not facilitate right hemisphere linguistic processing. Results are interpreted in terms of both psychoacoustic and emotion-specific theories of hemispheric specialisation.

ERP evidence for a sex-specific Stroop effect in emotional speech.

The present study investigated the interaction of emotional prosody and word valence during emotional comprehension in men and women. In a prosody-word interference task, participants listened to positive, neutral, and negative words that were spoken with a happy, neutral, and angry prosody. Participants were asked to rate word valence while ignoring emotional prosody, or vice versa. Congruent stimuli were responded faster and more accurately as compared to incongruent emotional stimuli. This behavioral effect was more salient for the word valence task than for the prosodic task and was comparable between men and women. The event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a smaller N400 amplitude for congruent as compared to emotionally incongruent stimuli. This ERP effect, however, was significant only for the word valence judgment and only for female listeners. The present data suggest that the word valence judgment was more difficult and more easily influenced by task-irrelevant emotional information than the prosodic task in both men and women. Furthermore, although emotional prosody and word valence may have a similar influence on an emotional judgment in both sexes, ERPs indicate sex differences in the underlying processing. Women, but not men, show an interaction between prosody and word valence during a semantic processing stage.

Matching prosodic and sound features: Performance of Down's Syndrome preschoolers

Eight Down's Syndrome children between the ages of 2.2 and 3.75 yr (X̄ = 2.73) participated in a study designed to determine if children with intellectual and language delay would show any consistent patterns in their imitations of adult vocalizations that were systematically varied in pitch, duration, and loudness. This performance was compared with the learner's proficiency in imitating speech sounds. Results yielded no overall relationship between learner's performance in the prosodic task and performance in the task using speech sounds as stimuli. All children matched at least some of the prosodic features examined. However, no particular prosodic features appeared more likely than others to be imitated. Results are discussed in terms of intersubject variability and the possible use of prosodic features as imitative stimuli in the early components of a communication interaction strategy.