Date of Award
11-30-2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Communication Disorders, MCD
First Advisor
Christina Akbari
Committee Members
Amy Shollenbarger; Joy Good; Mike McDaniel; Richard Neeley
Call Number
LD 251 .A566t 2015 H68
Abstract
Aprosodia, a disorder that results from damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, affects a person’s ability to comprehend and/or express emotion through changes in voice, or prosody. A common characteristic in children with High Functioning Autism (HFA) is a flat, monotonous voice that affects social reciprocity and communicative competence. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of the imitative approach, established for adults with aprosodia due to right hemisphere damage, on the affective prosodic skills in a child with HFA. A within subject research design was selected, and one participant received the imitative intervention over 10 weeks. Therapy focused on the production of three target emotions: happiness, anger, and sadness. Average fundamental frequency (F0), duration of the full utterance, duration of stressed and unstressed syllables within each utterance, and intensity of stressed and unstressed syllables within each utterance were used as indicators of affective prosody. Measurements were taken pre- and post-intervention using the TF32 computer software (Milenkovik, 2001). Significant change occurred for the duration of the full utterances for all target emotions, the duration of stressed syllables for anger and sadness, and in the duration of unstressed syllables for sadness. Significant differences were also found in the intensity of the unstressed and stressed syllables for anger and sadness. There were no significant changes in fundamental frequency for any of the target emotions. Overall, fundamental frequency was not found to be a significant factor in affective prosody either acoustically or perceptually. However, duration and intensity were both found to be variables which changed with intervention and greatly impacted the perception of appropriate emotional tone.
Rights Management
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Hutchison, Andria, "Aprosodia Therapy: The Impact on Affective Prosody in a Child with High Functioning Autism" (2015). Student Theses and Dissertations. 684.
https://arch.astate.edu/all-etd/684
