The prosodic, which contains suprasegmental elements such as pitch, intensity, and length, not only constructs strength and intonation but also plays an important role in communication.
The purposes of this study are to investigate how videos contai...
The prosodic, which contains suprasegmental elements such as pitch, intensity, and length, not only constructs strength and intonation but also plays an important role in communication.
The purposes of this study are to investigate how videos containing both facial and emotional expressions affect children’s prosody exaggeration and to support the study about prosody intervention in communication disorder groups based on the result.
General first-year elementary school children who can read naturally had participated in this study. Participants were divided into two groups: one group who only heard sound (n = 14) and the other group who encountered both sound and video (n = 14). To investigate how the video effect influences prosodic exaggeration, we conducted auditory perceptive evaluation and acoustic analysis.
The evaluation of auditory perception was conducted by selecting 13 sentences but excluded interrogative sentences. As a result, the prosody exaggeration effect was greater in the sound group than the sound with video group. In genre aspects, prosody exaggeration effect from the drama was greater than the musical animation.
When acoustically analyzing the prosody characteristics, a total of 7 acoustic parameters (Speaking Rate, maxE, minE, medianE, eRange, medianPitch, PitchRange) were used in the analysis. By examining the musical animation lyrics and the speaking rate, intensity, and pitch of the drama lines, the sound with video group had greater prosody exaggeration effect. When we attempted to utter only sound or both sound and video among musical lyrics group and drama lines group, there was no homogeneous variation in prosody before and after the experiment. Like as group comparison, nevertheless, media comparison also represented the greater prosody exaggeration effect when the participants encountered both sounds and videos. Therefore, we could expect positive effects of videos. The reference of this study will be meaningful for the aspects of prosody development among general children. Especially, this study data suggests application to language therapy for autism patients who are visually sensitive or patients with speech disorder.