How speakers living with Down syndrome produce monosyllabic interrogative and declarative sentence types Challenges of a preliminary laboratory phonology experiment

Juhász, Kornélia and Jankovics, Julianna and Pirsel, Katalin and Markó, Alexandra (2026) How speakers living with Down syndrome produce monosyllabic interrogative and declarative sentence types Challenges of a preliminary laboratory phonology experiment. In: 13th International Conference on Speech Prosody, 2026. ISCA, Philadelphia, pp. 882-886.

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Abstract

This paper aims to shed light on how adult individuals living with Down syndrome (DS) produce Hungarian monosyllabic rising interrogative and falling declarative utterances. DS is one of the most common genetic disorders, however, speech characteristics of speakers living with DS are relatively underresearched, especially if prosodic patterns are concerned. Thus, monosyllabic polar interrogative and declarative utterances were recorded in the production of 8 (6 female 2 male) DS adult speakers and 8 neurotypical (female) speakers. Afterwards, DS realizations were sorted in an identification experiment based on f0 patterns with 4 evaluators. Exclusively those realizations were involved in the analysis where all 4 evaluators agreed. Interrogative and declarative f0 contours were compared by GAMMs for each speaker, accompanied by a description of minimal, maximal and mean f0. Results reveal strong individual variation in the DS speakers’ production and suggest that female DS speakers show lower maximal f0 but similar mean f0 to the neurotypical group, in contrast to previous findings. In summary, most DS speakers could acoustically produce rising and falling f0 patterns similarly to controls, however, the proper elicitation of realizing the phonological contrast is still in question and requires further investigation.

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