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ERIC Number: EJ826746
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009-Feb
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1092-4388
EISSN: N/A
Acoustic and Perceptual Cues to Contrastive Stress in Dysarthria
Patel, Rupal; Campellone, Pamela
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, v52 n1 p206-222 Feb 2009
Purpose: In this study, the authors sought to understand acoustic and perceptual cues to contrastive stress in speakers with dysarthria (DYS) and healthy controls (HC). Method: The production experiment examined the ability of 12 DYS (9 male, 3 female; M = 39 years of age) and 12 age- and gender-matched HC (9 male, 3 female; M = 37.5 years of age) to signal contrastive stress within short sentences. Acoustic changes in fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration were studied. The perceptual experiment explored whether 48 unfamiliar listeners (24 male, 24 female; M = 23.4 years of age) could identify the intended stress location in DYS and HC productions. Results: Although both speaker groups used all 3 prosodic cues, DYS relied more heavily on duration. Despite reduced F0 and intensity variation within DYS utterances, listeners were highly accurate at identifying both DYS (greater than 93%) and HC (greater than 97%) productions. Acoustic predictors of listener accuracy included heightened prosodic cues on stressed words along with marked decreases in these variables for neighboring nonstressed words. Conclusions: Speakers signaled contrastive stress using relative changes in one or more prosodic cue. Although individual speakers employed different cue combinations, listeners were highly adept at discerning the intended stress location. The communicative potential of prosody in speakers with congenital dysarthria is discussed.
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). 10801 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD 20852. Tel: 800-638-8255; Fax: 301-571-0457; e-mail: subscribe@asha.org; Web site: http://jslhr.asha.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A