Analysis of atypical prosodic patterns in the speech of people with Down syndrome

The speech of people with Down syndrome (DS) shows prosodic features which are distinct from those observed in the oral productions typically developing (TD) speakers. Although a different realization does not necessarily imply wrong expression functions, atypical may hinder communication skills. focus this work is to ascertain whether can be case individuals DS. To do so, we analyze acoustic that better characterize utterances speakers DS when expressing functions related emotion, turn-end and phrasal chunking, comparing them used by TD An corpus has been recorded using PEPS-C competence evaluation tool. We use automatic classifiers prove predict less informative producing intended function identified listeners and, most cases, correctly discriminate analytical methods. However, greater difference between minimal pairs presented test found for comparison proposed methodological approach provides, on one hand, an identification set distinguish other, target therapy