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Abstract:
We have previously described a deficit in comprehension and
expression of affective prosody in children with developmental
language impairment (LI). The current study was undertaken to
determine whether this prosodic deficit extended to linguistic
prosody as well. Six children with LI and 9 controls ages 9-10
years were studied using 5 tasks designed to tap various aspects of
comprehension, discrimination, and elicitation of linguistic
prosody. Children with LI performed significantly more poorly on
two tasks involving repetition and spontaneously elicited
expression of linguistic prosody (e.g., sentence-level intonation)
than did controls. This study, as well as our earlier report on
affective prosodic deficits in LI, suggests that children with LI
may suffer from a generalized impairment in prosody. Alternatively,
their prosodic difficulty may reflect the fact that the tasks used
require processing of linguistically significant cues. Thus, it is
possible that the current findings may reflect the inability of
children with LI to process and/or express linguistic information
in general, as opposed to a prosodic deficit. Further studies using
non-linguistically significant tasks (e.g., filtered speech) may
help to better define the nature of the prosodic deficit in
LI.
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