The relevance of visual prosody for studies in language and speech-language pathology

Abstract

I support Peppé's (2009) claim that prosody should be put on the research agenda of those working on aspects of language and speech-language pathology. But while her lead article mainly focuses on auditory forms of prosody, such as intonation, rhythm and voice quality, I argue that visual forms of prosody, in particular facial expressions, also need to be explored in this domain. Indeed, both variations in the voice and face are part of a speaker's expressive style, and are picked up as communicatively relevant cues by addressees. At the same time, there is preliminary evidence from studies of people with autism to suggest that they may have problems both with the production and comprehension of visual forms of prosody, and have difficulties to integrate input from different modalities. And finally, I propose a game-based paradigm which is potentially useful for the diagnosis and therapy of people who experience problems with the use of facial expressions in their social and linguistic interactions.

Keywords:

• Visual prosody
• facial expressions
• autism
• diagnosis
• therapy