The Chinese Mentally Handicapped Children Emotional Rhythm Research

At present, the studies on the affective prosody of mentally retardated children (MR) from the neurolinguistic perspective is still in its initial stages. As a result, there is little knowledge of the performance in affective prosody.In this study, the method of extracting acoustic parameters to look into the MR's affective prosody is used. Furthermore, the author explores the affective prosody of mentally retarded native Chinese children through two tests and analyzes the reasons on the basis.The tests consist of two parts. For the first part, the author probes into 18 MR's affective prosody in a story-telling task by comparing with that of the normal children with a matching chronological age. The results show that the two groups take on significant differences in both the pitch range and the vowel duration while the former group's average pitch shows no difference from that of the latter one. Meanwhile, the standard deviation for the MR is greater than that of the normal children, which shows some atypical features. Making use of the same method, the paper in the second test examines the MR's affective prosody in the story-telling task by comparing with that of the normal children with matching language abilities. The results show that the two groups have significant differences in the average pitch and pitch range while the MR's vowel duration are no different from those of the normal children, however the standard deviation of MR is very large. The two tests show that the affective prosody of MR has been damaged to some extent, especially in the areas of pitch and vowel duration.The paper compares two groups of normal children's affective prosody on pitch range and vowel duration. The results show there is no difference in the average pitch in the pitch range but there does exist significant difference in the vowel duration. This, in part, shows the MR's atypical features are not the specific damage.The paper probes into the reasons for MR's affective prosody damage, which have been found to be multifarious and have much to do with both neuropathology and cognitive neuroscience. Findly, this paper provides some suggestions on the basis of the research for special education.