Clinical research with the prosody-voice screening profile

The Prosody-Voice Screening Pro® le (PVSP) is a clinical research instrument that quanti® es a speaker’ s conversational speech status in seven suprasegmental domains: phrasing, rate, stress, loudness, pitch, laryngeal quality and resonance. The PVSP has been used to assess the prosody-voice characteristics of children and adult speakers with typical speech-language development and with a variety of speech-language disorders of known and unknown origin. PVSP coding requires a trained examiner to determine, on an utterance-by-utterance basis within each of the seven domains, whether a speaker’ s prosody-voice characteristics can be de® ned as appropriate based on a set of auditory-perceptual criteria. This report provides brief overviews of the development, administration, and psychometric features of this screening tool, and summarizes prosody-voice ® ndings to date for several typically speaking and clinical populations.