Patel Rupal, Hustad Katherine C, Connaghan Kathryn P, Furr William
Northeastern University ; Department of Speech Language Pathology & Audiology ; College of Computer and Information Sciences.
University of Wisconsin - Madison, Department of Communicative Disorders Waisman Center.
J Med Speech Lang Pathol. 2012 Dec;20(4).
Exaggerated and redundant prosodic cue use has been noted among adults with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (CP) (Patel, 2004; van Doorn & Sheard, 2001). A possible explanation may be that speakers heighten prosodic contrasts to increase intelligibility. The current work examined whether children with dysarthria due to CP also produce exaggerated prosodic contours and if so, how prosodic cue use in these speakers impacts intelligibility. Acoustic analyses were conducted on a previously collected dataset of 2-7 word utterances produced by fourteen children with CP (7 with dysarthria and 7 without) (Hustad, Gorton & Lee, 2010). The dataset also included sentence-level transcriptions obtained from five listeners per speaker. Word intelligibility scores were derived from these transcripts and used to determine whether prosodic modulation differed for words with high versus low intelligibility. Although mean fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity range were similar across groups, words produced by children with dysarthria were slower and more variable in F0 than the group without dysarthria. Moreover, intelligibility decreased when children with dysarthria increased F0 and duration beyond the range used by children without dysarthria. Thus findings suggest that interventions targeting appropriate prosody may be beneficial in improving intelligibility in children with dysarthria and CP.
已有研究指出，继发于脑瘫（CP）的构音障碍成人存在夸张且冗余的韵律线索使用情况（帕特尔，2004；范·杜恩和希尔德，2001）。一种可能的解释或许是，说话者增强韵律对比以提高可懂度。当前研究考察了因脑瘫导致构音障碍的儿童是否也会产生夸张的韵律轮廓，如果是，这些说话者的韵律线索使用如何影响可懂度。对先前收集的一个数据集进行了声学分析，该数据集包含14名脑瘫儿童（7名有构音障碍，7名无构音障碍）说出的2至7个单词的话语（赫斯塔德、戈顿和李，2010）。该数据集还包括从每位说话者的五名听众那里获得的句子级转录内容。单词可懂度分数从这些转录内容中得出，并用于确定高可懂度单词和低可懂度单词的韵律调制是否存在差异。尽管各组之间的平均基频（F0）和强度范围相似，但构音障碍儿童说出的单词在F0方面比无构音障碍组更慢且变化更大。此外，当构音障碍儿童将F0和时长增加到超过无构音障碍儿童所使用的范围时，可懂度会降低。因此，研究结果表明，针对适当韵律的干预措施可能有助于提高构音障碍儿童和脑瘫儿童的可懂度。
