Developmental trajectory for production of prosody: lexical stress contrastivity in children ages 3 to 7 years and in adults.

PURPOSE: Accurate production of lexical stress within English polysyllabic words is critical for intelligibility and is affected in many speech-language disorders. However, models of speech production remain underspecified with regard to lexical stress. In this study, the authors report a large-scale acoustic investigation of lexical stress production in typically developing Australian English-speaking children ages 3-7 years ( n = 73) compared with young adults ( n = 24). METHOD: Participants named pictures of highly familiar strong-weak and weak-strong polysyllabic words. Of 388 productions, 325 met criteria for acoustic measurement. Relative vowel duration, peak intensity, and peak f (0) over the first two syllables were measured. Result Lexical stress was marked consistently by duration and intensity but not f (0). Lexical stress on strong-weak words was adultlike by 3 years. All 3 measures showed significant differences between adults and children for weak-strong words still present at 7 years. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that protracted development of weak-strong stress production reflects physiological constraints on producing short articulatory durations and rising intensity contours. Findings validate treatment that is centered on strong-weak stress production for children ≥ 3 years with dysprosody. Although intervention for the production of weak-strong words may be initiated before age 7 years, reference to normative acoustic data is preferable to relying on perceptual judgments of accuracy.

Screening for borderline personality disorder in outpatient youth.

UNLABELLED: Young people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) commonly seek help but often go unrecognized. Screening offers a means of identifying individuals for more detailed assessment for early intervention and for research. AIMS: This study compared the McLean Screening Instrument for Borderline Personality Disorder (MSI-BPD), Borderline Personality Questionnaire (BPQ), the BPD items from the International Personality Disorder Examination Screening Questionnaire and the BPD items from the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II disorders (SCID-II) Personality Questionnaire. METHOD: 101 outpatient youth (aged 15-25 years) completed the screening measures and were interviewed, blind to screening status, with the SCID-II BPD module. The screening measures were readministered two weeks later to assess test-retest reliability. RESULTS: All four instruments performed similarly but the BPQ had the best mix of characteristics, with moderate sensitivity (0.68), the highest specificity (0.90), high negative predictive value (0.91) and moderate positive predictive value (0.65). Compared to the other three instruments, the BPQ had the highest overall diagnostic accuracy (0.85), a substantially higher kappa (0.57) with the criterion diagnosis, the highest test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.92) and the highest internal consistency (alpha = 0.92). The only clear difference to emerge in the Receiver Operator Curve (ROC) analysis was that the BPQ significantly outperformed the MSI (p = 0.05). CONCLUSION: Screening for BPD in out-patient youth is feasible but is not a replacement for clinical diagnosis.