Browsing by Person "Pepp, Sue JE"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Assessing intonation and prosody in children with atypical language development: the PEPS-C test and the revised version
(2003) Pepp, Sue JE; McCann, Joanne
A procedure for assessing prosody and intonation in children (PEPS-C: Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems-Children), suitable for use by clinicians with both children and adults, is described. The procedure includes testing of four communication areas in which intonation/prosody has a crucial role: interaction, affect, boundary (chunking) and focus. Each area has parallel tasks for assessing understanding and expression of the functions and ability to discriminate and articulate the prosodic forms involved. The original and revised forms of the test are compared, with some discussion of procedural considerations. Past and present uses of the test and future applications are considered.
Emotional recognition in autism spectrum conditions from voices and faces
(SAGE, 2013-01-08) Stewart, Mary; McAdam, Clair; Pepp, Sue JE; Cleland, Joanne
The present study reports on a new vocal emotion recognition task and assesses whether people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) perform differently from typically developed individuals on tests of emotional identification from both the face and the voice. The new test of vocal emotion contained trials in which the vocal emotion of the sentence were congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to the semantic content. We also included a condition in which there was no semantic content (an 'mmm' was uttered using an emotional tone). Performance was compared between 11 adults with ASC and 14 typically developed adults. Identification of emotion from sentences in which the vocal emotion and the meaning of sentence were congruent was similar in people with ASC and a typically developed comparison group. However, the comparison group was more accurate at identifying the emotion in the voice from incongruent and neutral trials, and also from trials with no semantic content. The results of the vocal emotion task were correlated with performance on a face emotion recognition task. In decoding emotion from spoken utterances, individuals with ASC relied more on verbal semantics than did typically developed individuals, presumably as a strategy to compensate for their difficulties in using prosodic cues to recognize emotions.
Prosody and its relationship to language in school-aged children with high-functioning autism.
(2005) McCann, Joanne; Pepp, Sue JE; Gibbon, Fiona; O'Hare, Anne; Rutherford, Marion
Disordered expressive prosody is a widely reported characteristic of the speech of individuals with autism. Despite this, it has received little attention in the research literature and the few studies that have addressed it have not described its relationship to other aspects of communication. This study investigated the prosody and language skills of 31 children with high functioning autism. The children completed a battery of speech, language and nonverbal assessments and a procedure for assessing receptive and expressive prosody.Language skills varied, but the majority of children had deficits in at least one aspect of language with expressive language most severely impaired. All of the children had difficulty with at least one aspect of prosody and prosodic ability correlated highly with expressive and receptive language.
Prosody in Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Critical Review
(Taylor and Francis, 2003) McCann, Joanne; Pepp, Sue JE
Background: Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders present with unusual or odd-sounding prosody. Despite this widely noted observation,prosodic ability in autism spectrum disorders is often perceived as an underresearched area. Aims: This review seeks to establish whether there is a prosodic disorder in autism, what generalizations can be made about its various manifestations and whether these manifestations vary according to the diagnosis. A literature review was carried out to establish what areas of prosody in autism spectrum disorders have been researched to date, what the findings have been and to determine what areas are yet to be researched. Main contribution: It is shown that prosody in autism spectrum disorders is an under-researched area and that where research has been undertaken, findings often conflict. The findings of these conflicting studies are compared and recommendations are made for areas of future research. Conclusions: Research in this area has covered mostly prosodic expression, although some more recent studies cover comprehension, processing and the relationship of receptive prosodic ability to theory of mind. Findings conflict and methodology varies greatly.
Temporal markers of prosodic boundaries in children's speech production.
(Cambridge University Press, 2004) Dankovicova, Jana; Pigott, Kathryn; Wells, Bill; Pepp, Sue JE
It is often thought that the ability to use prosodic features accurately is mastered in early childhood. However, research to date has produced conflicting evidence, notably about the development of children's ability to mark prosodic boundaries. This paper investigates (i) whether, by the age of eight, children use temporal boundary features in their speech in a systematic way, and (ii) to what extent adult listeners are able to interpret their production accurately and unambiguously. The material consists of minimal pairs of utterances: one utterance includes a compound noun, in which there is no prosodic boundary after the first noun, e.g. 'coffee-cake and tea', while the other utterance includes simple nouns, separated by a prosodic boundary, e.g. 'coffee, cake and tea'. Ten eight-year-old children took part, and their productions were rated by 23 adult listeners. Two phonetic exponents of prosodic boundaries were analysed: pause duration and phrase-final lengthening. The results suggest that, at the age of 8, there is considerable variability among children in their ability to mark phrase boundaries of the kind analysed in the experiment, with some children failing to differentiate between the members of the minimal pairs reliably. The differences between the children in their use of boundary features were reflected in the adults' perceptual judgements. Both temporal cues to prosodic boundaries significantly affected the perceptual ratings, with pause being a more salient determinant of ratings than phrase-final lengthening.