Manual for Correction of Intonation in Kannada Speaking Children with Speech & Language Disorders

Abstract

Speech is highly complex and variable. The variation is fundamentally due to the pattern of execution and the intention behind the speech act. The syntactic and semantic contents of an utterance are made transparent to a listener by the feature of ''Prosody ". Prosody refers to the melody of speech. Prosodic features of speech may signal linguistic or emotional information. The three prosodic features, that is, rhythm, stress and intonation are the result of the interaction of suprasegmental factors such as pitch, loudness, articulation time and pause time. Disruptions of the suprasegmental and prosodic features of. Speech may result in affected speech intelligibility and hence, prosodic features should receive equal attention in the management of any communication disorder. Amongst the prosodic features, correction of intonation, which is detailed as the "perception of changes in the fundamental frequency of vocal fold vibration during speech production" is often considered to be the most challenging and evasive in nature. There are very few methods proposed for training! Correction of intonation in the literature. However, these have all been proposed for the Western languages, more specifically the English language. In the absence of any single source or reference in the available literature on correction of intonation in any of the Indian languages, the present study aimed at developing a manual for correction of intonation in Kannada speaking children. The manual is targeted for children who are above three years of expressive language age, having impaired/defective intonation due to any speech and language communication disorder. It is prepared for the Mysore and Bangalore dialect in Kannada. MCJ-K is an easy to use programmed approach meant to improve the perception of pitch contours and its associated characteristics and also facilitate the production of utterances with appropriate intonation curves/contours.