The role of phonetic cues in perception of prosodic segmentation in children with phonological disorder

• Grant number: 24/09617-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: November 28, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Geovana Carina Neris Soncin Santos
• Grantee: Karoline Araujo dos Santos
• Supervisor: Marc Swerts
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências (FFC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Marília. Marília , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Tilburg University, Netherlands
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/01478-3 - Prosody perception in children with phonological disorder: skills related to phrasing, BP.MS

Abstract

Research on atypical prosodic development in various languages is scarce. This is partly due to the significant challenge of understanding the development of prosody in typical populations. Even though the complexity and diversity of prosody, along with cultural and linguistic nuances, only makes this field of study more challenging, efforts have been made to address this topic, since it is an important issue to be included in clinical assessments and speech therapies. The analysis object of this study is the perception of prosodic segmentation, also known as demarcative function. This function allows the phonic chain to be grouped or delimited, thus showing whether the units are joint or split. In this respect, the present study is carried out in order to describe and compare how children with phonological disorder and children with typical language development perceive the prosodic boundary of intonational phrases in Brazilian Portuguese, in order to detect which phonetic cues support this perception. Therefore, the research is being conducted through an experimental approach, by performing two experiments related to two prosodic segmentation perception tasks. The results are going to support the field of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology in its intersection with Linguistics, both by helping generate groundbreaking data in phonological acquisition research and by fostering clinical care.