Reading Fluency in Children and Adolescents Who Stutter

Speech fluency is a major challenge for young persons who stutter. Reading aloud, in particular, puts high demands on fluency, not only regarding online text decoding and articulation, but also in terms of prosodic performance. A written text has to be segmented into a number of prosodic phrases with appropriate breaks. The present study examines to what extent reading fluency (decoding ability, articulation rate, and prosodic phrasing) may be altered in children (9–12 years) and adolescents (13–17 years) who stutter compared to matched control participants. Read speech of 52 children and adolescents who do and do not stutter was analyzed. Children and adolescents who stutter did not differ from their matched control groups regarding reading accuracy and articulation rate. However, children who stutter produced shorter pauses than their matched peers. Results on prosodic phrasing showed that children who stutter produced more major phrases than the control group and more intermediate phrases than adolescents who stutter. Participants who stutter also displayed a higher number of breath pauses. Generally, the number of disfluencies during reading was related to slower articulation rates and more prosodic boundaries. Furthermore, we found age-related changes in general measures of reading fluency (decoding ability and articulation rate), as well as the overall strength of prosodic boundaries and number of breath pauses. This study provides evidence for developmental stages in prosodic phrasing as well as for alterations in reading fluency in children who stutter.

(Dys)Prosody in Parkinson’s Disease: Effects of Medication and Disease Duration on Intonation and Prosodic Phrasing

The phonology of prosody has received little attention in studies of motor speech disorders. The present study investigates the phonology of intonation (nuclear contours) and speech chunking (prosodic phrasing) in Parkinson’s disease (PD) as a function of medication intake and duration of the disease. Following methods of the prosodic and intonational phonology frameworks, we examined the ability of 30 PD patients to use intonation categories and prosodic phrasing structures in ways similar to 20 healthy controls to convey similar meanings. Speech data from PD patients were collected before and after a dopaminomimetic drug intake and were phonologically analyzed in relation to nuclear contours and intonational phrasing. Besides medication, disease duration and the presence of motor fluctuations were also factors included in the analyses. Overall, PD patients showed a decreased ability to use nuclear contours and prosodic phrasing. Medication improved intonation regardless of disease duration but did not help with dysprosodic phrasing. In turn, disease duration and motor fluctuations affected phrasing patterns but had no impact on intonation. Our study demonstrated that the phonology of prosody is impaired in PD, and prosodic categories and structures may be differently affected, with implications for the understanding of PD neurophysiology and therapy.

There is no Post-focal De-phrasing in English

This paper studies the relationship between prosodic phrasing and prominence by addressing the questions of whether every prosodic phrase must have a head (a most prominent sub-constituent), and if so, how the head is marked. I study these questions by examining the intermediate phrase (iP) in English. If every iP must have a head, and this head must be marked by a pitch accent, then in an environment without any pitch accent, there should be no head/non-head distinction. And if there is no head, there should be no iP in this context either. I conducted a production study in English, and found durational evidence suggesting the presence of iP boundaries in an accent-less context. I also searched for durational evidence for iP-level prominence distinctions in this context, but here my results are mixed. One theoretical possibility that is compatible with my findings is that every phrase must have a head, but the head of an iP can be marked by something other than pitch accent, for example by phrasal stress.

Rhythm Comes, Rhythm Goes: Short-Term Periodicity of Prosodic Phrasing

Speech is perceived as a sequence of meaningful units. Speech prosody helps to delimit these units through pauses and acoustic modulations of pitch, amplitude and speech rate. These prosodic boundaries subdivide utterances into prosodic phrases. To be understood, prosodic phrases must obey cognitive and neurobiological constraints on the side of the listener. In particular, the neurobiological substrates of speech processing have been argued to operate periodically—with one electrophysiological processing cycle being devoted to the processing of one segment of the speech stream. We hypothesized that when processing is periodic, prosodic phrases should show periodicity as well. We investigated the periodicity of prosodic phrases in a corpus of radio news that has been manually annotated for full intonational and intermediate phrases by human experts. We find that sequences of 2 to 5 intermediate phrases are periodic at 0.8 to 1.6 Hertz within their superordinate intonation phrase. Across utterances, the exact duration of intermediate phrases fluctuates with the duration of superordinate intonation phrases, pointing to a dependence of prosodic time scales. Our findings provide evidence of short-term periodicity of prosodic phrasing within a highly specific range. While the determinants of periodicity are unknown, the results are compatible with an association between elec- trophysiological processing time scales and the phonological rhythms of language as such. This is a further step towards closing the gaps between the neurobiology of language, psycholinguistics, and linguistic description.

Prosody-syntax interface and prosodic phrasing in brazilian portuguese

This paper focuses on the Brazilian Portuguese (PB) prosodic phrasing and has two main goals: (1) to find a correlation between the prosodic constituents boundaries, as described by the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory (Nespor & Vogel, 2007 [1986], a.o.) and the perception and production of spontaneous and reading speech breaks, and (2) to describe the phonological characteristics and the syntactic ranking of perceived and non perceived edges. The corpus under analysis includes 5 extracts both of spontaneous and reading speech lasting about 2 minutes each. The reading speech (LE) emerged from the spontaneous speech (FE) orthographic transcription which was collected from an interview in an informal environment. In the perception test, 11 referees heard the 10 speaking extracts, without punctuation, and marked the perceived breaks in the orthographic transcription of each of them. Both the 5 speakers and the 11 referees were students at UFRJ, born in Rio de Janeiro, and were between 22 and 38 years old.The results point out that the prosodic breaks are mainly perceived at the intonational phrase (I) boundary, regardless of the speech style (FE: 91%; LE 99%). However, in LE, 64% of the foreseen I boundaries, described by the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory, were perceived as breaks, but in FE, just 37% were perceived. The most usual nuclear contour in both styles is H+L* L% (this being the Portuguese neutral declarative contour), but its occurrence frequency at perceived breaks draws a distinction between LE and FE (67% and 30%, respectively). In FE, contours like L+H* H% and L*+H H% are also produced (34%). In general, descendant nuclei in LE are predominant, as well as the edge tone L; in FE, both the descendant and ascendant nuclei distribution and low or high boundaries are similar. After running a statistic test, the appearance of an L edge, as a predictive for perception, was globally significant. Concerning the syntactic boundary, it was statistically checked and the result points out that breaks are mainly perceived at the matrix phrase limit (LE: 59%; FE: 61%,), showing the endurance of the matrix phrase edge/I boundary mapping. In general, FE has proved to have a bigger variation on the relation of predicted, perceived and produced, as it was expected, which was also confirmed by statistics. Therefore, the results show that the foreseen I phrasing is fairly robust in both styles, once only 13% of the predicted I boundaries have not been produced as so, regarding intonation. Besides, just 1,4% of the predicted phonological phrase (f) boundaries (and produced as Is) were perceived as breaks by the referees. With this study one may conclude that LE and FE share the same prosodic grammar, performed by the same type of phonological/syntactic cues; nevertheless, these are more consistent in LE and have a more disperse way in FE, adding to a greater difficulty at the systematic perception of prosodic boundaries in FE than in LE.

North Africa and the Middle East

This chapter provides an overview of the prosodic systems of languages spoken in North Africa and the Middle East, taking in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, plus the Arabian Peninsula, and the Middle East (but excluding Kurdish). The survey sketches the nature and scope of typological variation—in respect to prosody—across the whole of the Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan language families, addressing, within the limits of the existing literature: word prosody, prosodic phrasing, melodic structure, and prosodic expression of meaning (sentence modality, focus, and information structure). The survey is organized around language sub-families, reporting what is known about the different aspects of prosody for each sub-family, together with a brief discussion of priorities for future research.