Imitation of intonation contours by children with normal and disordered language development

This study investigated the relation between intonation and segmental phono logy in children with developmental language impairment (LI). Eleven 4-year -olds with LI and 11 age-matched children with normal language development imitated sentences that were modelled with different nuclear tones. Instrum ental analysis indicated that the children imitated falling tones more accu rately than rising tones, but there were no group differences. Although the children with LI had age-appropriate intonation skills, they all demonstra ted mild to moderate impairments in segmental phonology. This dissociation pattern was confirmed by correlation analyses, which indicated that the sev erity of a child's articulation disorder predicted how well he or she produ ced segmental contrasts-but not prosodic contrasts. The findings are discus sed in relation to the hypothesis that prosody pertains to a different 'tie r' of the grammar than other phonological systems, and that the speech of c hildren with LI may reflect asymmetrical degrees of impairment across proso dic and non-prosodic tiers.