The production of emotional prosody in varying degrees of severity of apraxia of speech.

UNLABELLED: The purpose of this study was to examine the abilities of subjects with varying degrees of apraxia of speech (AOS) to produce emotional prosody. One subject with mild AOS, one subject with moderate AOS and a control subject were asked to produce sentences with happy, sad and neutral emotional intent in a repetition and a reading experiment and naive listeners were asked to identify the intended emotion of the productions based upon the prosodic structures. Acoustic analyses of the subjects' productions revealed that unlike the control subject, the AOS subjects did not produce differences in FO, duration and amplitude cues within their prosodic structures to convey the different emotions. Naive listeners were able to identify the emotional intent of the control subject's productions but were unable to distinguish between the utterances of the experimental subjects. These findings are discussed in conjunction with suggestions for future research in this area. LEARNING OUTCOMES: The reader will (1) be able to define apraxia of speech and identify speech characteristics associated with apraxia of speech; (2) acquire an understanding of prosodic cues used to signal emotional intent; and (3) develop an understanding of the relationship between apraxia of speech and the production of emotional prosody.