Fundamental frequency and intensity mean and variability before and after two behavioral treatments for aprosodia

Emerging data suggest that aprosodia may be amenable to behavioral treatment. This study investigated the use of acoustic analysis of speech to quantify response to two speech treatments previously judged to have an effect based on perceptual assessment in three participants with primarily expressive aprosodia. The mean and variability of fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity (INT) during production of sentences requiring use of four different emotional tones of speech (i.e., happy, angry, sad, or neutral) was calculated before and after two mechanism-based treatments for aprosodia (i.e., TX1 and TX2). Statistical differences in F0 mean and variability were primarily observed following TX1, whereas differences in INT mean and variability were principally revealed following TX2. Additionally, significant differences in these acoustic values were noted across almost all pairwise comparisons of emotional sentence types (i.e., angry vs. sad, happy vs. sad, neutral vs. sad, angry vs. neutral, and happy vs. neutral). These preliminary data suggest that perceptual improvements in aprosodia can be measured quantitatively using acoustic analysis of speech and provide additional support for previously described behavioral treatments for this disorder. These findings also support previous reports that suggest that different emotional tones of speech are associated with differences in the acoustic speech signal. Copyright © 2009 Delmar Cengage Learning.