SELECTED ACOUSTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF CONTRASTIVE STRESS PRODUCTION INCONTROL GERIATRIC, APRAXIC, AND ATAXIC DYSARTHRIC SPEAKERS

Contrastive stress drills are often used in speech therapy to increase the intelligibility and communicative effectiveness of persons suffer ing from motor speech disorders. The rationale behind these drills is that the local effects of stress may improve articulatory performance on segments in the stressed word, as well as improve sentence-level pr osodic adequacy. The purpose of the present investigation was to explo re selected acoustic aspects of contrastive stress productions in cont rol geriatrics and speakers with apraxia of speech and ataxic dysarthr ia. Results suggest that the phrase-level temporal and spectral effect s of contrastive stress production among disordered speakers are not s traightforward, and do not necessarily parallel those for normal speak ers. These data are discussed relative to normal and disordered speech motor control.