Diagnosis
When studies of dysprosody first began, diagnosis involved an untrained ear determining impairments in the prosodic elements. However, over time and as dysprosody has been studied more closely, a more concrete method of diagnosis has been developed. One diagnosis technique is a rating scale, such as the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. The exam is a subjective rating system of volume (from loud to normal to soft), voice (from normal to whisper to hoarse), speech rate (from fast to normal to slow) and intonation which is rated on a scale from 1-7. One indicates no sentence intonation, four is given when sentence intonation is limited to abrupt pauses, and seven indicates normal intonation.
There are also more involved diagnostic evaluations for which contain both productive and comprehensive parts. In the productive part, the patient is asked to say sentences with certain instructions. In the comprehension section, the patient is asked to listen to sentences being said and then answer questions about how they were stated. In order to determine linguistic dysprosody, a patient is asked to read sentences that can either be a statement or a question using both declarative and interrogative intonations. How the patient uses prosodic contours to distinguish between asking a question and saying a statement is recorded. During the comprehension section of the evaluation, a clinician reads simple sentences with either a declarative or interrogative intonation and the patient is asked to identify whether the sentence is a question or a statement. Evaluation of these two parts can determine if the patient has linguistic dysprosody. Emotional dysprosody can be diagnosed by having a patient state a neutral sentence with different emotions, such as happy, sad, and angry. Patients with dysprosody will not be able to convey the emotions very well or differentiate their speech between the different emotions significantly. During the comprehension part, a clinician will say a sentence with specific emotional intonations and the patient must indicate the correct emotion. These techniques ultimately allow for the diagnosis of dysprosody and the degree of its severity in the patient.
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