Towards assessment of prosodic abilities in Swedish children with language impairment

Swedish children with language impairment (LI) have prosodic problems at word and phrase level, possibly also at discourse level. The aim of this study was to investigate the reliability and validity of a newly developed comprehensive procedure to capture prosody at word level (e.g., tonal word accent), phrase level (e.g., copula) and discourse level (e.g., conversation) in Swedish children with LI. Twenty-nine children with LI participated in the study. The reliability of the total score of the procedure was found to be sufficiently high, as was inter-examiner agreement. The total score significantly correlated with language comprehension and grammatical abilities. Prosodic problems were found by perceptual assessment in one third of the children. t test for equality of variances for presence versus absence of prosodic problems showed that these two groups significantly differed in total score of the procedure. This indicates that the procedure is a valid measure of prosodic problems.