The Prosody-voice Screening Profile (pvsp): Psychometric Data and Reference Information for Children

BACKGROUND The Prosody-Voice Screening Profile PVSP. A final section provides detailed (PVSP) is a perceptual procedure to assess a prosody-voice reference data for children with speaker's prosody and voice in conversational normal speech-language development and speech. The PVSP provides summative and children with speech-language disorders of per-utterance data on the appropriateness of known and unknown origin. a speaker's phrasing, rate, stress, loudness, pitch, and quality. Quantitative information is obtained on 31 types of exclusion codes reflecting paralinguistic status and 31 subtypes of inappropriate prosody and voice. This report is divided into three sections: (a) conceptual and technical rationale for conversation-based prosody-voice assessment, Conceptual and Technical Considerations (b) psychometric findings from validity, reliability, and efficiency studies, and (c) Prosody occupies a unique place in the prosody-voice reference data for 252 approxistudy of normal and deviant communication. mately 3-19 year-old children with normal Unlike speech, language, fluency, voice, and and disordered speech development. Some of hearing disorders, which each have their own the information in this first technical report research literatures and clinical subspecialities, overlaps information available in more detail the area of prosody disorders has no recogin the PVSP Training Manual. Other sections nized subdiscipline. Relevant theories, represent new technical data gathered in 1990search, and applied information on prosody are 1992. found in many fields, including descriptive A prosody-voice assessment procedure nication arts, the phonetic sciences, and comtermed The Prosody-Voice Screening Profile municative disorders. Theoretical frameworks (hereafter, for convenience, the PVSP; Shriand applications include proposals to characberg, Kwiatkowski, & Rasmussen, 1990) was terize the underlying organization of prosody developed in the context of a research proin languages and language users, algorithms to gram in speech disorders of known and undeal with prosodic information in speech known origin. The goal was to develop a recognition systems, models of the motor psychometrically stable procedure based on control and phonatory mechanisms subserving the same conversational speech sample used to prosody in manifest speech, and functional assess speech production, language producanalyses of prosody as a reflection of tion, and intelligibility. The first section of this sociolinguistic mores and affective traits and technical report provides background on states. Assessment methods for disordered prosody and voice assessment, including prosody range from brief check lists, to elaborationale on conceptual and technical issues and a brief description of the major elements of the procedure. The second section describes findings from psychometric studies to estimate the validity, reliability, and efficiency of the linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, developmental linguistics, psychiatry, commu-