The interplay between articulation and prosody in children with impaired speech: Observations from electropalatographic and perceptual analysis

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of connected speech data from six older children (9;05 – 16;03 years) with persisting developmental speech impairments. It uses a combination of perceptual, electropalatographic and acoustic analyses to explore the interplay between articulatory accuracy and prosodic fluency in their speech production, and contrasts their connected speech production with their production of single words. Both normal and atypical word boundary behaviours are identified, and each child presents with a different profile of articulatory and prosodic behaviours which are not observable in their production of single words. The clinical implications of the differences between single word production and connected speech behaviour are discussed.

Keywords:

• Electropalatography
• articulation
• prosody
• connected speech
• developmental speech impairments