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Although tongue twisters have been widely use to study speech production in healthy speakers, few studies have employed this methodology for individuals with speech impairment. The present study compared tongue twister errors produced by adults with dysarthria and age-matched healthy controls. Eight speakers (four female, four male; mean age = 54.5 years) with spastic (mixed-spastic) dysarthria of varying aetiology (cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, multiple system atrophy) and eight controls (four female, four male; mean age = 56.9 years) were audio-recorded producing tongue twisters. One word in each tongue twister was marked for prominence. Speakers with dysarthria produced significantly more errors and spoke slower than healthy controls. The effect of prominence was significant for both groups--words spoken with prosodic prominence were significantly less error prone compared with words without prominence. While both groups produced most errors on words in the third position (of four-word utterances), speakers with dysarthria also produced high rates of errors on the first and fourth words. This preliminary investigation demonstrated the promise of applying the tongue twister paradigm to speakers with dysarthria and contributes to the evidence base for the implementation of prosodic strategies in speech intervention.

Prominence, the expression of informational weight within utterances, can be signaled by prosodic highlighting (head-prominence, as in English) or by position (as in Korean edge-prominence). Prominence confers processing advantages, even if conveyed only by discourse manipulations. Here we compared processing of prominence in English and Korean, using a task that indexes processing success, namely recognition memory. In each language, participants' memory was tested for target words heard in sentences in which they were prominent due to prosody, position, both or neither. Prominence produced recall advantage, but the relative effects differed across language. For Korean listeners the positional advantage was greater, but for English listeners prosodic and syntactic prominence had equivalent and additive effects. In a further experiment semantic and phonological foils tested depth of processing of the recall targets. Both foil types were correctly rejected, suggesting that semantic processing had not reached the level at which word form was no longer available. Together the results suggest that prominence processing is primarily driven by universal effects of information structure; but language-specific differences in frequency of experience prompt different relative advantages of prominence signal types. Processing efficiency increases in each case, however, creating more accurate and more rapidly contactable memory representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of connected speech production in Mandarin Chinese must specify how lexical tone, speech segments, and phrase-level prosody are integrated in speech production. This study used tongue twisters to test predictions of the two different models of word form encoding. Tongue twisters were constructed from 5 sets of characters that rotated pairs of initial segments or pairs of tones, or both, across format (ABAB, ABBA), and across position of the characters in four-character tongue twister strings. Fifty two native Mandarin Chinese speakers read aloud 120 tongue twisters, repeating each one six times in a row. They made a total of 3503 (2.34%) segment errors and 1372 (.92%) tone errors. Segment errors occurred on the onsets of the first and third characters in the ABBA but not ABAB segment-alternating tongue twisters, and on the onsets of the second and fourth characters of the tone-alternating tongue twisters. Tone errors were highest on the third and fourth characters in the tone-alternating tongue twisters. The pattern of tone errors is consistent with the claim that tone is associated to a metrical frame prior to segment encoding, while the format by position interaction found for the segment-alternating tongue twisters suggest articulatory gestures oscillate in segment production as proposed by gestural phonology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]