Jasmin Kyle, Dick Frederic, Tierney Adam Taylor
Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Ehgam, TW20 0EX, UK.
Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck University of London, London, WC1E 7HX, UK.
Wellcome Open Res. 2021 Oct 6;5:4. doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15607.2. eCollection 2020.
Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings. These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects and failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Duration) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 59 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.
韵律可以被定义为跨越单词、短语和句子的节奏和语调模式。准确感知韵律是语言处理诸多方面的一个重要组成部分，比如解析语法结构、识别单词以及确定重音可能所在的位置。韵律感知对于语言习得很重要，并且在与语言相关的发育障碍中可能会受损。然而，现有的韵律感知评估存在一些缺点。这些缺点包括由于天花板效应而不适用于正常发育的成年人，并且无法让研究者区分音高和时间线索等个体声学特征的独特贡献。在此，我们展示了多维度韵律感知量表（MBOPP），这是一种用于评估韵律感知的新型工具。它由两个子测试组成：语言焦点，用于测量听到重音或句子重音的能力；短语边界，用于测量听到复合句中一个短语结束和另一个短语开始位置的能力。可以分别检查个体声学维度（音高和时长）的感知，并且由于刺激是使用连续语音变形空间创建的，实验者可以精确校准测试难度。我们展示了来自59名个体样本的验证分析，并讨论了该量表如何用于检查不同人群的韵律感知。
