## 1 Introduction  
Prosody is a fundamental speech element that contributes to conveying important communicative functions. For example, it contributes to establishing sentence-modality and conversational turns, conveying emotions, segmenting the speech-chain and expressing the focus of an utterance [1]. The importance of these functions highlights how communication can be negatively affected in individuals who present prosodic deficits [2]. Furthermore, in such cases, communication problems may lead to social isolation, especially when other linguistic components are also affected [2]. This is often the case of individuals with intellectual disability [2]. Intellectual disability can be caused by different factors and, among those, genetics plays a relevant role. This is well illustrated when considering Down syndrome, which is the most frequent genetic cause of intellectual disability [3]. Specifically, Down syndrome is caused by the presence of a third copy of chromosome 21 (usually called \"trisomy 21\"). The syndrome provokes a cascade of effects: to mention a few, middle ear disease;immune and endocrine abnormalities; skeletal, heart and digestive system defects; cognitive, learning and attentional limitations; and our concern, language delays [4]. All the areas of language may be impaired, but not in the same degree, as described by [PERSON] et al. [5]. Although lexical acquisition is delayed, difficulties with morphology and syntax appear to be more pronounced (e.g., incorrect use of morphemes; use of short sentences) [6]. With regard to pragmatics, individuals with Down syndrome have trouble producing and understanding questions and emotions, signaling turn-taking, or keeping to topics in conversation; while the study of [PERSON] et al. [7] demonstrated that children with Down syndrome are impaired relative to norms from typically developing children in all areas of pragmatics. At the phonological level, speech intelligibility is seriously damaged by the presence of errors on producing some phonemes, the loss of consonants and the simplification of syllables [8]. In spite of this general description, variability in the different linguistic skills of individuals with Down syndrome has often been documented [4]. As far as prosody is concerned, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [9] report disfluencies (stuttering and cluttering) and impairments in the perception, imitation and spontaneous production of prosodic features; while [PERSON] et al. [10] have connected some of the speech errors with difficulties in the identification of boundaries between words and sentences. Nevertheless, characterizing prosodic impairments in populations with developmental disorders is a hard task [11]. To fulfill such an aim, prosody assessment procedures appropriate for use with individuals with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities need to be employed. The Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C) test has proved to be successful in this respect [12;13]. PEPS-C follows a psycholinguistic approach by assessing both the skills needed to understand and express prosodic functions and those required to discriminate and imitate prosodic forms [14]. When used with English-speaking children with Down syndrome, a lower performance than expected by chronological age is observed in all prosody tasks [15]. After comparisons with typically developing children matched for mental age, impairments are also found for the discrimination and imitation of prosody [15]. To tackle linguistic impairments from a clinical perspective, technological tools aimed to facilitate speech and language therapy have been developed. These tools are called Computer-Aided Speech and Language Therapy (CASLT) tools and deal with a large variety of language problems. There are tools that are focused on training basic phonation skills in children with neuromuscular disorders, training the articulatory level of language or introducing the impaired child population to language understanding [16;17].