Intonation in the WH and Y-N questions of mothers of hearing impaired: Influence of type of partner in communication

Abstract

‘Intonation’ a prosodic feature of speech is characterized by the variation of fundamental frequency over time. The study attempted to analyze the variations in the use of intonation patterns of WH and Y-N questions in mothers following two approaches; Woodford Oral technique and non-specific technique, when they speak (a)to their children with hearing impairment and compare the same with their use of the same questions when it is addressed to (b)normal adults and (c)normal children. 30 mothers of children with hearing impairment served as participants and they were divided into 2 groups – one group followed Woodford Oral Technique and the other group followed non-specific technique. The participants were instructed to ask as many questions as possible to 3 different communication partners on a selected picture stimuli. A total of 14 WH and 5 Y-N questions spoken with a similar syntactic structure were analyzed for the intonation features that were expressed by majority of the mothers of the two groups. The intonation contours for each question across WH and Y-N questions, three conditions and two groups of mothers were extracted and plotted. Temporal measures included duration of the intonation contours and frequency measures included the analysis of onset and terminal F0 of the intonation contour, F0 range in the intonation contour, terminal contour of the intonation curve and declination gradient in the intonation contour. The results revealed a significant difference in the pattern of intonation contours especially in the frequency related parameters across the two groups of participants, across the conditions. Also, significant difference in the intonation contours were observed across the conditions for mothers following Non-Specific Technique suggesting that more natural intonation curves were used by mothers in Non-Specific Technique than the Woodford Oral Technique.