This special issue is a selection of papers presented at the workshop entitled “Prosody in typical and atypical populations” held at the University of Reading in September 2012. Although there seems to be quite a vibrant community of researchers working on prosody in typical as well as in clinical populations, when one looks closely at current publication records, this still seems to be an under-represented topic, and we hope that this special issue will contribute towards further promotion of this area of research.
Prosody is a suprasegmental aspect of speech and it includes a number of different aspects, such as stress, intonation and speech rhythm. Both comprehension and production of prosody are extremely important for successful communication. Research into child language acquisition shows that infants are sensitive to prosodic cues before they are able to communicate verbally and that prosody may be a channel which helps with the acquisition of words and grammar. However, research has also reported a number of different prosodic deficits, either in paediatric or adult populations. Prosodic deficits often accompany other speech, language and communication deficits, as for example in children with autistic spectrum disorders, specific language impaired; however, sometimes clinical populations may present with relative strengths in prosodic processing (as it will be discussed by Gavaro & Salmons, this issue). Better understanding of the nature of the prosodic deficits associated with different populations is paramount towards creating management and therapy protocols which will address these deficits most effectively. Hence, this special issue will offer further elucidation of some of the prosody issues found in specific language impairment, agrammatic aphasia and Elderspeak (the prosody often adopted when speaking to elderly people). This is by no means an exhaustive coverage of the topic – and it certainly presents only a snapshot of prosodic issues in a few populations – but it does cover different European languages; we hope that this special issue will inspire and motivate further research and, in particular, ways of addressing the problems that the papers cover.
The first three papers in the issue are concerned with the acquisition of different prosodic constraints which bear upon either word formation or grammatical inflection processes in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Ulrike Domahs and colleagues’ paper focuses on the morphological and prosodic constrains in the acquisition of the words derived with -heit (which contain simple bases with final stress) and those derived with -keit (which contain complex bases with a weak final syllable) in typically developing children and those with SLI. They report that, while typically developing 8-year-old children show adult-like mastery of these forms, children with SLI aged between 8 and 10 were unable to master the morphological and prosodic constraints, thus showing reduced sensitivity to prosodic properties of grammatical forms.
Kauschke and colleagues continue in a similar direction but focus their investigation on the acquisition of prosodic constraints of inflectional morphology, namely the plural form in German, in both typically developing children and in children with SLI. The German plural system lends itself to the investigation of sensitivity to prosodic constraints, because a specific prosodic constraint requires a plural form to end in an unstressed syllable which results in German noun plurals being mostly disyllabic trochees. The findings suggest that children with SLI produce fewer prosodically well-formed plural forms than their typically developing peers. Taken together, these two papers suggest that children with SLI find the prosodic demands of grammatical morphemes problematic, which may be related to their difficulties with grammar.
The third paper on SLI by Haake and colleagues investigates stress processing in this population. They address the important issue of whether word stress impairments in SLI are due to deficits in basic auditory processing or whether they are due to a degraded phonological representation or both of these. The findings of this study suggest that some children with SLI have basic auditory perception deficits and some have phonological representation deficits in the absence of basic auditory deficits. The authors point out that the existence of different subtypes of stress impairment and its potential relevance for subsequent steps of language acquisition call for detailed assessment and specific treatment approaches.
Samuelsson, Adolfsson and Persson discuss the very interesting and not often addressed phenomenon of Elderspeak, which refers to adjustments made in communication with elderly people which are similar to those made in interaction with infants. The paper discusses data which are based on the recordings of interactions between caregivers and residents, and interactions between caregivers and colleagues in geriatric settings. The authors report that caregivers used higher pitch, more varied intonation and slower speech rate in interaction with the elderly than in interaction with their colleagues. This is discussed with reference to its implications for communication with the elderly.
Gavaro and Salmons address the issue of the ability of people with agrammatic aphasia to discriminate between different intonation contours of syntactic constructions. The paper highlights a relative strength in the linguistic profile of people with agrammatic aphasia, that is, that despite comprehension deficits, they are able to discriminate between different intonation contours associated with specific grammatical constructions.
The last paper by Hargrove is a summary of what is currently known with regard to prosody interventions. She concludes that, although the existing body of literature on prosody in clinical populations has been growing, there is still modest literature on prosodic intervention, suggesting that researchers should be aware of existing concerns, and that they should aim to increase the accessibility of their findings to practising clinicians so that research findings are translated into clinical practice.
Last but not least, we would like to thank the contributors for helping us create this special issue, the reviewers involved in assessing the papers, and Martin Ball for initiating the idea of a special issue and providing continuous support in the process. The workshop from which these papers originated was supported by a British Academy Research Development Award (BR100076) to Vesna Stojanovik and Jane Setter.