Pausa e dominios prosodicos na disartria

With the general aim of contributing to studies about the phonological level of language in pathological conditions, this thesis presents an analysis of pause insertion and structuring of prosodic domains in the speech of two dysarthric subjects whose dysarthria was due to a car crash.The main objective of this thesis is to describe the prosodic characteristics of dysarthric speech.This was done by using the theory of Prosodic Phonology which states, among other things, that oral language is structured into prosodic domains.A prosodic and intonational approach was considered the most adequate for the data.It took into account intonational, segmental and rhythmic evidences from the three higher domains of prosodic hierarchy: phonological phrase, intonational phrase and phonological utterance.The analysis of the data followed the theoretical perspective of Prosodic Phonology (NESPOR & VOGEL,1986) and Intonation Phonology (LADD ,1996) as used by TENANI ( 2002) to analyze Brazilian Portuguese data.The data we analyzed consisted of three sets of recordings: a) the reading of a text; b) the reading of experimentally controlled sentences from the corpus by TENANI (2002); and c) spontaneous speech and interviews.Phonological processes that make up the frontiers of prosodic domains were analyzed for the dysarthric subjects, following Tenani's proposals.The phonological processes were: pause insertion, fricative voicing, tapping, syllable determination, elision, dyphtongation and vowel degemination.To better describe the phonological alteration of dysarthic speech, a comparison was made between the results of TENANI ( 2002) for adult Brazilian Portuguese subjects and the dysarthric ones.The results show evidence of the preservation of prosodic domains in the speech of the subjects.Pause insertion was the most used prosodic element to structure the prosodic domains.As for the use of pauses and intonation contour, it was verified that the tonal association correspond to the study carried out by TENANI (2002).With regard to the phonological processes implementation, fricative voicing was done by the subjects mainly inside the same phonological phrase.In the other frontiers considered, they usually choose pause insertion to structure domains.Tapping, whenever used, was applied only inside the same phonological phrase.Syllable degemination indicated important rhythmic aspects in subjects speech.Whenever used, it promoted a more stressed rhythm in the speech of the most severe dysarthric subject.When it was not used in the speech of the slightly dysarthric subject it indicated a more syllabic rhythm which sounded as a Spanish foreign accent to some listeners.As for elision and dyphtongation, the speech of the dysarthric subjects confirm the results by TENANI (2002), for they implement such processes both inside the same phonological phrases and between them.Vowel degemination, however, was blocked through pause insertion

Brazilian Portuguese · Intonation · Phonological rule · Phrase · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Voice and Speech Disorders