In celebration of my launch of Functional Treatment for Motor Speech, this blog series looks closer at individual treatments for dysarthria and acquired apraxia.
As someone who embraces the Life Participation Approach in speech therapy, it’s my aim to provide any sort of speech therapy in a way that improves functional outcomes. We are used to seeing this with language, and maybe cognition, but Motor Speech treatment needn’t be excluded! While it is an impairment-level problem, I believe that we can focus on function by 1. Using words and phrases that MATTER (personally-relevant) and 2. Include SPEAKING (not just speech) and real-life practice within our therapy sessions and home programs.
Today, we’re talking about Contrastive Stress Sentences.
Tell me about Contrastive Stress Sentences:
These type of sentences are an exercise that can be used in speech therapy. They are recommended for both dysarthria and apraxia. I’ll confess that I’ve done these sentences in the past – but wasn’t always sure why I was doing these or what I should be watching for.
WHY do we do Contrastive Stress Sentences?
Contrastive stress practice is about practicing the control of saying sentences in different rhythms, or stressing different parts of the sentence. They are recommended as helpful for dysarthria and apraxia: to increase awareness to control respiration, rate, and pitch for prosody in connected speech, to improve rate / rhythm control and improve multi-word sequencing and intonation.
What sort of goals would Contrastive Stress Sentences address?
The overall intended effect is to improve naturalness and prosody of speech. It will be up to the SLP’s clinical judgement for each client to over-emphasize stressed word, or aim to sound as natural as possible with prosody. This can depend on the severity of client and if awareness or ability is the main target.
Do you have Contrastive Sentences I can use in Speech Therapy?
I’m so glad you asked. I took a unique approach with Contrastive Stress Sentences in my Functional Treatment for Motor Speech. In an aim to use personally-relevant words and phrases while completing contrastive stress exercises, I chose to make Contrastive Stress MadLibs, so that each client can use words that are relevant to them while completing this exercise. Everything you need is ready to go as part of Functional Treatment for Motor Speech.
Improving sentence intonation is one of the key elements in English pronunciation. The four basic types of word stress that lead to proper intonation in English are:
- Tonic stress
- Emphatic stress
- Contrastive stress
- New information stress
Tonic Stress
Tonic stress refers to the syllable in a word which receives the most stress in an intonation unit. An intonation unit has one tonic stress. It’s important to remember that a sentence can have more than one intonation unit, and therefore have more than one tonic stress.
Here are some examples of intonation units with the tonic stress bolded:
- He’s waiting
- He’s waiting / for his friend
- He’s waiting / for his friend / at the station
Generally, the final tonic stress in a sentence receives the most stress. In the above example, ‘station’ receives the strongest stress.
There are a number of instances in which the stress changes from this standard.
Emphatic Stress
If you decide to emphasize something, you can change the stress from the principal noun to another content word such as an adjective (big, difficult, etc.), intensifier (very, extremely, etc.) This emphasis calls attention to the extraordinary nature of what you want to emphasize.
For example:
- That was a difficult test. – Standard statement
- That was a difficult test. – Emphasizes how difficult the test was
There are a number of adverbs and modifiers which tend to be used to emphasize in sentences that receive emphatic stress:
- Extremely
- Terribly
- Completely
- Utterly
- Especially
Contrastive Stress
Contrastive stress is used to point out the difference between one object and another. Contrastive stress tends to be used with determiners such as ‘this, that, these and those’.
For example:
- I think I prefer this color.
- Do you want these or those curtains?
Contrastive stress is also used to bring out a given word in a sentence which will also slightly change the meaning.
- He came to the party yesterday. (It was he, not someone else.)
- He walked to the party yesterday. (He walked, rather than drove.)
- He came to the party yesterday. (It was a party, not a meeting or something else.)
- He came to the party yesterday. (It was yesterday, not two weeks ago or some other time.)
New Information Stress
When asked a question, the requested information is naturally stressed more strongly.
For example:
- Where are you from? – I come from Seattle, in the USA.
- What do you want to do? – I want to go bowling.
- When does class begin? – The class begins at nine o’clock.
Use these various types of stress to help improve your pronunciation and understandability.
