The effect of cognitive cueing on acoustic parameters of speech prosody in 8 -12 years old normal children

In voice therapy, cognitive cueing approach elicits intended vocal behaviors by stimulating mental patterns and semantic imagery that is included in the tasks. In the current study, cognitive cues were used in order to change acoustic parameters of speech prosody in normal children. This clinical control trial study was done over 120 normal children (60 male, 60 female) ranging from 8 to 12 years old. The children read 6 sentences twice with keywords including respectively “aloud”; “slowly”; “push”; “up”; “happy”, and “sad” before and after cognitive cueing. Acoustic parameters of speech prosody including fundamental frequency, intensity, duration and their changes were analyzed by Praat software throughout reading tasks. Results showed that fundamental frequency mean in all keywords and sentences (except for the sentence included “push” keyword) have been significantly increased in all age and gender groups (p˂0.05). Also intensity mean increased significantly in the sentences included “aloud”; “push”; “up”, and “happy” keywords but decreased in the sentences included “slowly”, and “sad” keywords. The duration parameter changed significantly in all keywords and sentences (p˂0.05). Cognitive cues may be able to modify various aspects of speech prosody without imposing any external model in normal Persian children. Future studies can investigate the effect of cognitive cueing approach to improve speech prosody problems of children in Persian.