Diagnosing Dysarthria in Adults. A New Speech Assessment Method for Polish, English, and Spanish

7 1. Physiological Foundations of Speech (Material to Dysarthria) Taking the above into account, speech sound length is included in the battery of tests developed for the Spanish and English version of the diagnostic method proposed here, since it is certain to manifest itself in the prosodic sphere of these languages. In the Polish version this phenomenon is disregarded as perceptually irrelevant. 1.3.2. Word and sentence stress Word stress involves giving acoustic prominence to at least one syllable in a word. Sentence stress, in turn, is logically motivated and involves augmented vocal prominence of a word which carries special affective or conceptual significance. From the perspective of dysarthria diagnostics, sentence stress is more important than word stress. The freely spoken form of Polish, which is considered in the diagnosis of dysarthria, is not characterized by a strong rhythm. Some rhythmic patterns are nevertheless perceived, and so are departures from such regular patterns. In Polish, in contradistinction to Spanish for instance, word stress is fixed in the sense that it typically falls on the penultimate syllable (paroxytone), which sometimes requires shifts from one morphological unit to another in response to morphological suffixation (e.g. stary2 ‘old,’ singular masculine nominative, vs. starego3 ‘old’ singular masculine genitive). In certain words, the stress exceptionally falls on the antepenultimate syllable (proparoxytone)—these include verbs in the 1st and 2nd person plural of the past tense, in all persons singular, and in the 3rd person plural of the conditional mood, numerals from 400 to 900, as well as in foreign borrowings that have not been fully assimilated to the Polish stress pattern, such as (fizyka4 ‘physics,’ matematyka5 ‘math,’ uniwersytet6 ‘university’). There are also some words in Polish with the stress falling on the preantepenultimate syllable, such as verbs in the 1st and 2nd person plural in the conditional mood, e.g. rozmawialibyśmy7 ‘we would (have) talk(ed).’ 2 [For ease of use, here, and elsewhere, boldface indicates the stressed syllable.—ed.’s note]. IPA transcription: /ˈstarɨ/. 3 IPA transcription: /staˈrɛgɔ/ 4 IPA transcription: /ˈfizɨka/ 5 IPA transcription: /matɛˈmatɨka/ 6 IPA transcription: /uɲiˈvɛrsɨtɛt/ 7 IPA transcription: /rɔzmaˈvʲalibɨɕmɨ/

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