ERIC Number: EJ909086
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-Oct
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1092-4388
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Available Date: N/A
Emotional Prosody Perception and Production in Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type
Horley, Kaye; Reid, Amanda; Burnham, Denis
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, v53 n5 p1132-1146 Oct 2010
Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated emotional prosody in patients with moderate Dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) With Late Onset. It was expected that both expression and reception of prosody would be impaired relative to age-matched controls. Method: Twenty DAT and 20 control participants engaged in 2 expressive and 2 receptive tasks with randomly presented exemplars of sentences targeting the emotions of happiness, anger, sadness, and surprise. Results: In the expressive tasks, objective acoustic measurements revealed significantly less pitch modulation by the patient group, but these measurements showed that they retained the ability to vary pitch level, pitch modulation, and speaking rate as a function of emotion. In the receptive tasks, perception of emotion by the patient group was significantly inferior to the control group. Conclusions: Implications are discussed regarding impaired emotional prosody in DAT, and the utility of objective acoustic measures in revealing subtle deficits and overcoming methodological inconsistencies is emphasized. Further research is critical in advancing our understanding of this pervasive disorder and is important, clinically, in the provision of specific interventions.
Descriptors: Sentences, Emotional Response, Dementia, Acoustics, Older Adults, Comparative Analysis, Receptive Language, Expressive Language, Intonation, Alzheimers Disease
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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