Lins Jordan S, Smith Kimberly G
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans.
Department of Speech Pathology & Audiology, University of South Alabama, Mobile.
Am J Speech Lang Pathol. 2024 Dec 12;33(6S):3410-3421. doi: 10.1044/2024_AJSLP-23-00345. Epub 2024 Nov 7.
This study acoustically characterized the oral reading prosody of persons with aphasia (PWA) and neurotypical controls for a connected text and aimed to determine which prosodic features were most associated with performance on a reading comprehension task.
Six PWA and six neurotypical, age- and education-matched controls participated in this preliminary study. Participants read Paragraph 3 of the Gray Oral Reading Tests-Fifth Edition aloud and subsequently answered five comprehension questions. A total of 11 measures related to phrasing, intonation, and expressivity were extracted using Praat for each participant in order for comparisons to be made across participant groups and associations examined with reading comprehension scores.
The Mann-Whitney test suggested a significant difference between PWA and control participants for intersentential pause durations, pausal intrusion frequency, and duration of pausal-pausal syllables. Although statistically nonsignificant, intersentential pause duration, pausal intrusion frequency, pausal intrusion duration, duration of prepausal syllables, and intensity amplitude following a syntactic juncture were all moderately correlated (all s > .58) with comprehension of Paragraph 3 of the Gray Oral Reading Tests-Fifth Edition in PWA. All measures were weakly correlated with comprehension for the control participants.
PWA demonstrated statistically significant longer durations for intersentential pauses and prepausal syllables, and a greater number of pausal intrusions. Interestingly, three of the five measures moderately correlated to comprehension were those that were statistically different between the two participant groups. As such, preliminary findings of this study warrant further investigation in a larger sample of PWA.
本研究对失语症患者（PWA）和神经典型对照者朗读连贯文本的口语韵律进行了声学特征分析，旨在确定哪些韵律特征与阅读理解任务的表现最相关。
6名失语症患者和6名年龄、教育程度匹配的神经典型对照者参与了这项初步研究。参与者大声朗读《格雷口语阅读测试-第五版》的第3段，随后回答5个理解问题。使用Praat为每位参与者提取了总共11项与措辞、语调及表现力相关的指标，以便在不同参与者组之间进行比较，并研究与阅读理解分数的关联。
曼-惠特尼检验表明，失语症患者与对照参与者在句间停顿时长、停顿插入频率和停顿-停顿音节时长方面存在显著差异。虽然在统计学上不显著，但句间停顿时长、停顿插入频率、停顿插入时长、停顿前音节时长以及句法连接处后的强度幅度在失语症患者中均与《格雷口语阅读测试-第五版》第3段的理解呈中度相关（所有相关系数s>.58）。所有指标与对照参与者的理解均呈弱相关。
失语症患者在句间停顿和停顿前音节的时长上表现出统计学上的显著延长，且停顿插入次数更多。有趣的是，与理解呈中度相关的5项指标中有3项在两组参与者之间存在统计学差异。因此，本研究的初步结果值得在更大样本的失语症患者中进一步研究。
