[Prosodic analysis of speech of patient affected by peripheral facial paralysis]

The aim of study of prosody in facial palsy is to assess the intensity of pathology in suprasegmental viewpoint in order to establish a proper rehabilitation.

Patients were recorded during a reading and spontaneous speech test and a prosodic observation of speech spectrogram provided by Praat software.

The Accentual Groups lowering and significant dysprosodics elements (adverse effects and breaking balance) and a larger amount of disfluencies showed that the prosody of patients with facial palsy is altered because they need to swallow their saliva intentionally. Then, the decrease of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and the opinion of the jury highlight a decrease in desire to communicate and a loss of speech informativeness.

In patients with severe facial palsy, there is an impact of swallowing disorder (caused by salivary stasis) on the prosody of speech, with variations in the position of intonations boundaries and the intensity of prosodic marking. This also creates impact on fluency and on the perception of the message by the listener.