Lexical stress contrast marking in fluent and non-fluent aphasia in Spanish: The relationship between acoustic cues and compensatory strategies

ABSTRACT

This study sought to investigate stress production in Spanish by patients with Broca’s (BA) and conduction aphasia (CA) as compared to controls. Our objectives were to assess whether: a) there were many abnormal acoustic correlates of stress as produced by patients, b) these abnormalities had a phonetic component and c) ability for articulatory compensation for stress marking was preserved. The results showed abnormal acoustic values in both BA and CA’s productions, affecting not only duration but also F0 and intensity cues, and an interaction effect of stress pattern and duration on intensity cubes in BA, but not in CA or controls. The results are interpreted as deriving from two different underlying phenomena: in BA, a compensatory use of intensity as a stress cue in order to avoid ‘equal stress’; in CA, related to either a ‘subtle phonetic deficit’ involving abnormal stress acoustic cue-processing or to ‘clear-speech’ effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Acoustics
• aphasia
• apraxia of speech
• compensation
• lexical stress

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Anna Marczyk and Alba Rosas for their help with collecting the data used in this study and the anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Declaration of interest

The author reports no declarations of interest.

Funding

Support for this research was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, National Programme for Fostering Excellence in Scientific and Technical Research grant FFI2013-40419-P.

Additional information

Funding

Support for this research was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, National Programme for Fostering Excellence in Scientific and Technical Research grant FFI2013-40419-P.