Intonation Contours in the Speech of Individuals with Broca’s Aphasia

Abstract

The study acoustically examined the nuclear tones and terminal intonation contours in individuals with Broca’s aphasia vis-à-vis the neurologically normal participants. Ten individuals with Broca’s aphasia who spoke Kannada as mother tongue participated in the study along with 10 age and gender matched neurologically normal individuals. They narrated a picture card while their utterances were audio recorded using a digital tape recorder. The Computerized Speech Lab (CSL) 4400 software was used for generating intonation contours from the utterances of participants. The nuclear tones were analysed in terms of traditional classification of rise, fall, rise-fall, fall-rise, rise-fall-rise, fall-rise-fall, and level contour whereas the terminal contours analysis included rise, fall, and level contours. The results revealed presence of similar types of nuclear contours in both groups of participants. However, the terminal contours had occurred more frequently in within-sentence intonation units in individuals with Broca’s aphasia suggesting that were using this as a device to indicate utterance continuity, owing to a limited output in terms of utterance length. The intonation contour analysis results suggest that individuals with Broca’s aphasia are able to signal variations in F0 and they are able to utilise effectively the prosodic features of nuclear and terminal contours in discourse