Auditory and visual cues on Perception of Prosodic Focus by children with Phonological Disorder

• Grant number: 23/12699-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2024
• End date: December 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Geovana Carina Neris Soncin Santos
• Grantee: Felipe Ferro Erlo
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências (FFC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Marília. Marília , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 20/10144-3 - Prosody production and perception in children with typical and atypical phonological development, AP.JP

Abstract

This research project works on perception of contrastive prosodic focus by children diagnosed with phonological disorder, which are native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. Contrastive focus corrects or denies an information presented in a previous utterance in a communicative situation. The perception of contrastive focus is investigated under the theoretical approach that conceives speech as multimodal, since it is assumed that speakers mark linguistic contrasts and other meanings, using verbal and visual cues. Recent results presented by literature have shown that children with phonological disorder present inconsistencies in production of prosodic focus. However, regarding perception of prosodic contrasts by these children, little is known. Then, research on this topic is needed. To better understand aspects of prosody perception by Brazilian children, the goals of the study are: (1) to compare the auditory and visual performance of children with phonological disorder and children under typical language development to identify contrastive focus; and (2) to verify if the condition of stimuli presentation would affect the groups' performance in contrastive focus identification. To achieve these goals, it will be applied a speech perception experiment, designed, and developed inside the activities of the Project "Production and perception of prosody in children with typical and atypical phonological development" (FAPESP Young Researcher Project 10144-3). During the experiment, the task of each participant will be indicating, through a forced choice response, the most prominent word in the sentence. Results will be analyzed by the percentage of correct responses gave by each participant. The reaction time that each participant takes to present the answer after the presentation of stimuli will be also considered. Integrated into the Young Researcher Project, the results obtained will offer (i) descriptive contributions to studies of multimodal perception of Brazilian Portuguese; (ii) theoretical contributions, offering results to linguistics studies and speech-language therapy studies regarding the acquisitional aspect of prosody in the broader context of language/speech acquisition; and (iii) applied contributions, by offering data that indicate how sensitive children with different developmental and clinical conditions are to cues of different natures involved in speech perception, which can thus reverberate in the planning of clinical interventions.