Analysis of intonation patterns in Cantonese aphasia speech

This paper presents a study on intonation patterns in Cantonese aphasia speech. The speech materials were spontaneous discourse recorded from seven pairs of aphasic and unimpaired speakers. Hidden Markov model based forced alignment was applied to obtain syllable-level time alignments. The pitch level of each syllable was determined and normalized according to the given tone identity of the syllable. Linear regression of the normalized pitch levels was performed to describe the intonation patterns of sentences. It was found that aphasic speech has a higher percentage of sentences with increasing pitch. This trend was found to be more prominent in story-telling than descriptive discourses.