Speech difficulties of people with Down Syndrome: changes in declination and tonal register

Authors

Keywords:

Down Syndrome, intonation, declination, acoustics, Spanish

Abstract

The study examines the phonetic modelling of declination, a measure that relates the F0 contour with the temporal properties, in a corpus of speech of young adults with Down Syndrome (DS) in order to provide reasonable interpretations of the subjective evaluation of monotonous speech that is usually attributed to this group. The acoustic analysis of speech fundamental frequency (F0) during the utterance in a set of declarative sentences pronounced by speakers with DS and its comparison with the same set of sentences spoken by non-disabled speakers has verified the tendency of F0 to decline gradually during utterances in both groups. Nevertheless, both the slope and the difference between high tones and low tones throughout the sentence is lower, a decrease that may explain, in part, the monotonal effect of speech of people with DS.

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Published

2020-06-16

How to Cite

Aguilar, L., & Borràs-Comes, J. (2020). Speech difficulties of people with Down Syndrome: changes in declination and tonal register. Journal of Experimental Phonetics, 29, 11–13. Retrieved from https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/experimentalphonetics/article/view/44026

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Vol. 29 (2020)

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