A Study On The Tone And Intonation Output Of Chinese Children With Spastic Cerebral Palsy

Children with cerebral palsy are often accompanied by dysarthria due to the influence of physiological factors.Tone and intonation are very important prosodic features in Chinese and play the important role in our daily communication.However,at present,the rehabilitation treatment of children with cerebral palsy mainly pays attention to the abnormal pronunciation of their segments,and does not pay enough attention to the pronunciation of supersonic segments such as intonation and tone,which leads to the problem of abnormal tone of children with the increase of age.If children cannot produce right tone or intonation,it will bring troubles to their daily communication.Therefore,this paper hopes to arouse the attention of parents and speech rehabilitation therapists to the prosodic characteristics of children with cerebral palsy through the study of tone and intonation of these children,and to provide practical help for the evaluation of speech disorders and speech rehabilitation of them.In this paper,16 Chinese children with spastic cerebral palsy(CP children)were selected as the speakers.Their ages are from 4-6 years and all have dysathria.19 Chinese children with typically development and have the same age with the CP children were selected as the control group.In order to study the tone and intonation of the CP children,this study is divided into the perception experiment and the acoustic experiment.In the perceptual experiment,16(8 men and 8 women)listeners were invited to judge the tone and intonation of the children.It aims to investigate the tone and intonation intelligibility of the children with cerebral palsy.The acoustic experiment examined the tone and intonation output pattern of the children with cerebral palsy by analyzing the F0,duration and intensity.The main research results are as follows:1.Single tone results:(1)The overall tone intelligibility of CP children is lower than TD children,and each tone shows the phenomenon of narrow tone domain,and the duration of single word is longer.Under the condition of slower speech speed,they are still unable to produce a fuller tone,which reduces the tone intelligibility to a certain extent.The mean intensity of the four sounds are smaller,but the intensity range is too large.On the one hand,the children of CP have the problem that the overall pronunciation loudness is not large,on the other hand,they show the phenomenon of abnormalloudness,which can not be maintained in a relatively stable state when they speak,resulting in the sound being large or small.(2)Among the four tones,T2 and T3 have the lower intelligibility and the F0 contours are abnormal comparing with the TD children.(3)The tone intelligibility will increase when the vowel opening reduce.The vowel u has the highest tone intelligibility.2.Disyllabic tone results:(1)T12,T12,T14 have higher intelligibility,T13,T21,T22,T23,T31,T32,T41,T42,T43,T44 were lower than the TD children.(2)The syllable position affects the intelligibility of the disyllabic tones.When the front words' tone was T1 or the after words' tone was T4,the CP children's tone intelligibility was higher than other words'.(3)The front words of the CP children have higher pitch,longer duration and lower intensity mean.They are more likely to produce abnormal F0 contour comparing with the TD children.3.Intonation results:(1)The intonation intelligibility of CP children's interrogative sentence was significantly lower than the statement sentence.But,there was no significant difference between CP and TD group.It means that the CP group can produce the interrogative intonation but not good.(2)When the CP children produced the statement sentence,their pitch was higher,sentence duration was longer and the intensity became lower than the TD group.They can raise the pitch to produce the interrogative sentence but the rise was not obvious.(3)CP children cannot distinguish statement intonation from interrogative intonation by raising the pitch of the last word.There is no obvious trend of widening of the pitch range.(4)CP children have defects in raising the fundamental frequency,so they will take measures to improve the sound intensity,especially the last word sound intensity to compensate the fundamental frequency.