Prosodic Imitation in Children With Down Syndrome: Evidence From Sentence Repetition and Pitch Contour Modeling

This study examined prosodic speech production in children with Down syndrome (DS) using a structured imitation task designed to elicit sentence-level fundamental frequency (F0) contrasts. The goal was to assess whether dynamic F0 modeling could reveal expressive prosodic patterns in this population.

Fourteen children with DS and 22 typically developing (TD) children completed a sentence repetition task with four prosodic conditions: neutral statements, yes/no questions, subject emphasis, and object emphasis. Productions were acoustically analyzed with generalized additive mixed models to model time-varying F0 contours.

Both groups modulated F0 to mark prosodic contrasts, but TD children demonstrated clearer and more distinct contours. Children with DS produced less differentiated contours overall, although question intonation was reliably marked.

Children with DS are able to produce some prosodic contrasts in imitation, but their pitch trajectories were flatter and showed reduced contrastiveness compared to their TD peers. Whereas the present study focused on F0, future work should examine whether children with DS rely on other prosodic features, such as intensity or duration. Structured imitation paradigms, although not assessed here for clinical feasibility, may hold potential for informing future assessment tools and intervention approaches targeting expressive prosody.