Prosodic Disorders

Prosodic disorders are disruptions to the features of speech that are typically responsible for conveying a range of information about, for instance, the [Page 1485]grammatical status of an utterance, relative stress and emphasis in words and longer stretches of speech, structures of discourse and interaction, and aspects of speaker mood and emotion. In normal speech, alterations in pitch, amplitude, and duration constitute the core framework for implementing prosodic variation and distinctions, with those alterations being largely determined by particular vocal tract configurations and sequencing and timing of articulatory events. While the segmental level of speech production consists of a phoneme-by-phoneme activation process on the part of the speaker (notwithstanding the ways in which successions of speech sounds affect and change one another), the term suprasegmental ...