Pitch perception and production in children diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech and typically developing controls

Abstract

Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is a pediatric neurodevelopmental speech sound disorder that presents with deficits in articulation and prosody. There have been multiple studies that have investigated aspects of prosody in children with CAS and have found that this population presents with a deficit in production. A major drawback of these studies is they have not considered investigating the mechanisms of perception of prosody in this population. If children with CAS present with perceptual deficits with regard to prosody, it is likely that they will have problems associated with production too. It is imperative to systematically investigate the perceptual deficit of prosody in this population. Considering this limitation, the current study aimed to investigate the perception of prosody in CAS. Participants in this group included 20 children (10 with CAS and 10 typically developing) ages 5-12. This study had two parts: perception and production. In the perception experiment, participants were asked to listen to CVC words and choose the emphatically stressed one. In the production experiment, participants were asked to listen to and produce emphatically stressed CVC words. Outcome measures included percent accuracy for the perception portion and vowel length for the production portion. We found that production as well as perception of prosody was impaired in children with CAS in comparison to their typically developing peers.