A Multi-perspective Approach to the Dynamics of Real-time Prosody

Much of what is known about prosody derives from clinical studies of adults with hemispheric lesions. Moreover, prosodic abnormalities tend to be interpreted with little attention to speech planning difficulties. This investigation describes a model of discourse and speech planning that utilizes an integrated methodology, incorporating neuroanatomical, discourse, and acoustic-physiological domains. Videotaped samples of naturalistic spoken discourse patterns and more constrained speaking tasks were acoustically analyzed to identify correlates of prosody. Participants were two men who had similar discrete infarcts to the left inferior precentral gyrus and two otherwise healthy, age-matched peers. Discourse samples were analyzed within three types of encoding units: clausal, intonational, and supraclausal. Results indicated that discourse planning styles were similar among all participants. Prosodic differences were more apparent within the more constrained speaking tasks. These results will be discussed with respect to units of encoding and the role of the precentral gyrus in speech planning.