Intonation in children with cerebral palsy - version 1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Intonation in children with cerebral palsy
IRAS ID
134249
Contact name
Anja Kuschmann
Contact email
Research summary
Cerebral palsy (CP) is a developmental motor disorder that affects an individual’s ability to move, maintain balance and posture. It is caused by damage to the developing brain before, during or following birth. CP affects two to three children in 1,000, rendering this lifelong, chronic condition the most common motor disability in childhood.
Many children with CP have difficulties with speaking, which impacts severely on their access to social and educational activities. The most frequent speech impairment in CP is developmental dysarthria. Key features of this motor speech disorder are shallow, irregular breathing, harsh sounding voice, hypernasal speech and imprecise articulation. Often the naturalness of speech, also referred to as intonation, is reduced as well. That is, the children do not vary vocal speech features such as pitch and volume to the same extent as typically developing children do. However, impaired intonation reduces speech intelligibility, which is a key contributor to functional communication.
Despite the central role of intonation in communicating effectively and its contribution to being understood properly, research on intonational development in CP is scarce. As a result, little is known about intonational difficulties and their relationship to intelligibility in children with CP. The aim of the research project, funded by the British Academy, is to fill this knowledge gap.
This will be achieved by exploring already existing anonymised speech corpora that have been recorded as part of speech therapy studies for children with CP. The secondary data will be analysed using specialist software and linguistic analysis techniques
REC name
London - Camden & Kings Cross Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/LO/1175
Date of REC Opinion
18 Jul 2013
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion