The contribution of the emphasis in tonic syllable to fluency of spontaneous speech and reading

Abstract

Introduction: Due to constant evolution of the modern world and increasing competition, enterprises and several professionals are developing their fluency at speaking and reading. Objective: Evaluate the contribution of the stressed syllable emphasis to fluency of spontaneous speech and reading due its speaking length reduction. For this reason the Unidade em Movimento method was considered. Method: There were selected 21 female university students divided into three groups. At G1 (n=7) the emphasis on the tonic syllable was observed and at G2 (n=7) the speech speed; G3 (n=7) was a control group. The three groups had postural (body language and postural alignment) and breathing orientation. During the spontaneous speech the members were filmed discussing the theme leisure. For the reading exercise, participants were given an actual text focusing on social inclusion. The readings were recorded at the radio studio at Universidade Veiga de Almeida’s multimedia center. Later, the recordings were perceptual analyzed by four speech and language therapists trained on the Unidade em Movimento method basis. Result: G1 sample presented a significant increase, from pre to post training, while making use of the emphasis on spontaneous speech (p=0,015) and text readings (p=0,031), and an expressive decay on disfluency at text readings (p=0,015). There were no expressive variations at G2 and G3 pre and post trainings. Conclusion: Our database contributed the understanding of time length being an essential parameter to optimize oral speech fluency and reading. The results demonstrate that decreasing length of the tonic syllable contributes to the fluency at reading. On the other hand, spontaneous speech’s results at disfluency, evidences a tendency of its reduction.