Dysprosody in Broca's aphasia: A case study

Abstract

A detailed acoustic analysis of timing, intensity, and fundamental frequency (F 0 ) at different levels of linguistic structure was conducted on the speech output of a Broca's aphasic who was a native speaker of Thai. Timing was measured with respect to syllables, phrases, and sentences in connected speech. Intensity variation at the sentence level was measured in connected speech. F 0 variation associated with the five Thai tones was measured in both isolated words and connected speech. Results indicated that timing was differentially impaired depending upon complexity of articulatory gesture and size of the linguistic structure. Timing, as well as intensity, was aberrant at the sentence level. In contrast, F 0 contours of the five tones were spared at all levels of lingustic structure. Findings are interpreted to support the view that dysprosody in Broca's aphasia is more applicable to speech timing than to F 0 . © 1989.