Shifting focus: Advancing prosodic assessment with naturalistic tasks

We evaluate newly developed tasks from the Naturalistic Contrastive Focus (NCF) tasks by comparing performance to that of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech and Communication task (PEPS-C; Peppé, 2015) with the goal of developing a clinically relevant, ecologically valid, and easy-to-use prosodic assessment for speech language pathologists (Diehl and Paul, 2009; Hawthorne and Fischer, 2020). Our aims are to (1) examine construct validity of the NCF and PEPS-C tasks via perceptual judgments and prosodic annotations made using Points, Levels, and Ranges framework (PoLaR; Ahn et al., 2021) and (2) determine the concurrent and discriminant validity between the two assessments with naïve listener judgements. Data from 17 adults and 10 children (with and without speech sound disorders) have been collected. Sentences containing target words are annotated for prominence, intonational phrase boundaries, turning points of the f0 pitch contour, and pitch ranges using PoLaR, with analyses ongoing. Initial perceptual analyses reveal that adults understand and produce contrastive focus more often during the NCF tasks (M=89%–99%, SD = 2.5%–5%) when compared to the PEPS-C tasks (M=84%–89%, SD = 10%–15%). Next steps include examining naïve listener judgments of prominence and naturalness between expressive tasks. These newly developed tasks will aid in the diagnosis and assessment of populations with speech-language disorders.