Pitch as the Main Determiner of Italian Lexical Stress Perception Across the Lifespan: Evidence From Typical Development and Dyslexia

Abstract

The study deals with the issue of lexical stress perception in both a developmental (comparing children and adults with typical development) and a clinical perspective (comparing typically developing children and children with dyslexia). The three parameters characterizing the acoustic profiles of words and non-words in a certain language are duration, pitch and intensity of its syllables. Based on (sparse) previous literature on Italian and other European languages, it was expected that syllable duration would be the parameter predominantly determining the perception of stress position. It was furthermore anticipated that children with dyslexia may be found to have an altered perception of lexical stress, due to their impairments in auditory processing of either pitch, duration or (more controversial) intensity. Systematic manipulation of the pitch, duration and intensity profiles of three Italian trisyllabic non-words produced a series of 81 stimuli, that were judged with respect to stress position (perceived on the ultimate, penultimate, or antepenultimate syllable) by the three groups of participants. The results showed, contrarily to expectations, that the pitch component is the most reliable acoustic cue in stress perception for both adults, in whom this dominance is very strong, and typically developing children, who showed a similar but quantitatively less marked pattern. As to children with dyslexia, they did not seem to rely on any parameter for their judgments, and rather gave random responses, which point to a general inability to process the various acoustic modulations that normally contribute to stress perception. Performance on the stress perception task strongly correlates with language (morphosyntactic) measures in the whole sample of children, and with reading abilities in the group with dyslexia, confirming the strict relationship between the two sets of skills. These findings seem to support a language-specific approach, suggesting that the set of acoustic parameters required for the development of stress perception is language-dependent rather than universal.

Lower prosodic sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia and its impact on Chinese reading

“…In terms of the effect size (), the group difference found in lexical tone awareness was the largest among all three types ( = 0.35, indicative of a “large” difference in the classification of Pierce, Block, & Aguinis, 2004), while the group differences in intonation and lexical stress were similar (= 0.12 and 0.10, both indicative of “medium” differences in the classification of Pierce et al, 2004). Generally, despite the structural differences, the lower performance in the three types of prosodic sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia found in our study echoed, to a certain extent, previous findings from alphabetic languages (e.g., Alves et al, 2015; Caccia et al, 2019; Goswami et al, 2010; Hazan et al, 2013; Ziegler et al, 2012).…”

“…Additionally, Hazan, Messaoud-Galusi, and Rosen (2013) reported that dyslexic children had significantly less sensitive to various stimuli containing multiple intonation patterns (i.e., rising, falling, steady or rising-falling) than typically developing children. This view has been further validated by other studies that also focused on relevant sensory abilities, such as pitch perception (e.g., Caccia et al, 2019;Ziegler, Pech-Georgel, George, & Foxton, 2012). Such insensitivity in intonation awareness in children with dyslexia was found to be transferred to influent intonation in their oral expression (Alves, Reis, & Pinheiro, 2015).…”

“…As our review above indicates, Chinese is a tonal language, and Mandarin Chinese contains four lexical tones. Lexical tone signifies lexical meaning and has been proven to be involved in different levels of language processing and reading (Wang et al, 2017), and the nature of lexical tone is considered to be based on pitch movement (the rise and fall of the pitch) (Caccia et al, 2019). Additionally, as previous studies have proven the difference in lexical tone awareness between Chinese children with and without dyslexia (e.g., Li & Ho, 2011; Wang et al, 2017), children with dyslexia are considered to meet difficulties in perceiving pitch clearly (Ziegler et al, 2012).…”

The processing of rhythmic structures in music and prosody by children with developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder

“…To this aim, further research is needed to better understand the relationships and mutual influences between language and rhythm perception in these populations, and to define the developmental trajectories of such relationships. Moreover, further studies are needed to shed light on the processing of the single acoustic parameters (duration, pitch, and intensity) in children with DD and DLD (see also Caccia et al., 2019). In an intervention‐oriented perspective, prosodic tasks specifically designed to address segmental or suprasegmental analysis could be useful tools for the prevention and rehabilitation of DLD in the clinical practice, since they are enjoyable and motivating tasks that can easily be delivered in the form of games (e.g., dee‐dee—analogous tasks, prosody imitation, sentence–picture matching tasks etc.).…”

“…A smaller proportion of polysyllabic words are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable. Stress Position has been found to modulate the effect of the parameters determining lexical accent perception in TD children, but marginally so in children with DD (see Caccia et al., 2019).…”