Dysprosody in Communication Disorders

Abstract

Prosody is an umbrella term for modulations of the speech stream in terms of its loudness, length, and pitch. These modulations manifest themselves as the relative duration of syllables (determining speech-rhythm and speech-rate), the placing and quantity of stress in words, and changes of pitch (which produce pitch- patterns or contours). These affect the linguistic impact of utterances, conversational interaction, and the verbal punctuation of speech; they also give indications of the speaker’s identity (accent) and attitude to what is said. “Intonation” is another umbrella term for these modulations, which can also be described as “suprasegmental”: “segmental” refers to the makeup of words in terms of consonants and vowels, and “suprasegmental” to levels which span individual sounds/ letters, that is, generalizations that apply to syllables, whole words, phrases, and discourse. Prosody functions at several levels to enable speakers to construct discourse through expressive language to serve grammatical, pragmatic and affective meanings. The main prosodic features are generally taken to include length, accent and stress, pitch, intonation, and potentially a few others.