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Speech and Prosody Characteristics of Adolescents and Adults With High-Functioning Autism and Asperger Syndrome
Abstract
Speech and prosody-voice profiles for 15 male speakers with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) and 15 male speakers with Asperger syndrome (AS) were compared to one another and to profiles for 53 typically developing male speakers in the same 10- to 50-years age range. Compared to the typically developing speakers, significantly more participants in both the HFA and AS groups had residual articulation distortion errors, uncodable utterances due to discourse constraints, and utterances coded as inappropriate in the domains of phrasing, stress, and resonance. Speakers with AS were significantly more voluble than speakers with HFA, but otherwise there were few statistically significant differences between the two groups of speakers with pervasive developmental disorders. Discussion focuses on perceptual-motor and social sources of differences in the prosody-voice findings for individuals with Pervasive Developmental Disorders as compared with findings for typical speakers, including comment on the grammatical, pragmatic, and affective aspects of prosody.
... Previous perceptual studies highlighted the following characteristics of voice of children with ASD: "abnormal control of pitch and volume, and deficits in vocal quality" [1][2][3]; speech can be overly fast, jerky or loud, or it can be characterized by high pitch, large pitch excursions and increased pitch range, a loud voice, a quiet voice, inconsistent pauses, a creaky or nasal voice [1,2,[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]; bouncing pitch, growling voice [18], quiet voice and lack of covariation between frequency and intensity in intonation [19]. ...
... Previous perceptual studies highlighted the following characteristics of voice of children with ASD: "abnormal control of pitch and volume, and deficits in vocal quality" [1][2][3]; speech can be overly fast, jerky or loud, or it can be characterized by high pitch, large pitch excursions and increased pitch range, a loud voice, a quiet voice, inconsistent pauses, a creaky or nasal voice [1,2,[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]; bouncing pitch, growling voice [18], quiet voice and lack of covariation between frequency and intensity in intonation [19]. ...
... Previous research analyzed children speaking Finnish [18], Hebrew [32], English [2,35], Danish [33] and Swedish [36]. However, voice quality parameters in Italian-speaking children with ASD have not been studied. ...
This research aims to measure the voice quality of Italian-speaking children with autism. Previous studies on voice quality of individuals with autism reported abnormal characteristics like high pitch, great pitch excursions, large changes in volume, and creaky voice, hoarseness and harshness; also, great variability was found among the children. Previous studies were mostly based on perceptual evaluations and did not focus specifically on Italian-speaking children. The present study aims to gather acoustic data to identify features of dysphonia in autism, and to shed some light on the nature and causes of this dysphonia. The results would help create a pediatric assessment tool for early identification of autism.
Method: Participants were 13 native Italian-speaking boys and 1 girl (4-9 years old), with a diagnosis of High Functioning Autism. Acoustic voice parameters, relative to pitch, loudness and voice quality, were extracted from CAPE-V speech samples, and analyzed by Praat. A one-sample t-test was performed to verify whether the voice parameters were within normal limits, and an ANOVA was conducted to evaluate the variability in the voice parameters within the group.
Results: The results indicated that Italian-speaking children with autism used a normal voice quality (no hoarseness, roughness, or breathiness). However, high pitch, great pitch modulation, high loudness and wide dynamic range were found, probably determined by the use of sing-song intonation by some children.
Conclusion: The children with autism in this study did not show abnormal voice quality. However, they showed an abnormal use of pitch, pitch modulation, loudness and dynamic range, in sustained vowels and in the speech tasks.
Lay summary: The results provide evidence that Italian-speaking children with autism spoke with normal voice quality, but used high pitch, great pitch modulation, and high loudness and wide dynamic range. The abnormal levels and ranges of pitch and loudness were probably determined by the use of sing-song intonation by some children.
The pitch and loudness abnormalities found in Italian-speaking children correspond to features also reported in previous studies on children speaking other languages and might constitute a universal characteristic of voice production in autism.
... In contrast to the above results, a number of studies on the production of stress found no indication of difficulties (Arciuli et al., 2020;Shriberg et al., 2001;Van Santen et al., 2010). These studies cover the whole age range (4-6 years, 10-50 years, 4-8 years, respectively). ...
... Fine et al. (1991) found that while participants were able to produce broad focus using an appropriate intonation pattern, this was not the case for narrow or contrastive focus. Shriberg et al. (2001) did not specify the contexts in which accentuation was inappropriate. The broad age ranges (10-50) make the findings difficult to interpret with respect to developmental trajectories (see also Nadig & Shaw, 2015). ...
... This provides further evidence for the general view that there are differences in (some aspects of) affective prosody production for autistic children. This view is further supported by Ricks (1975) and Lord (1996), as cited in Shriberg et al. (2001). They report that it is more difficult for parents of autistic children to identify the emotional content of pre-speech vocalisations than it is for parents of children with intellectual disability or typical development (Shriberg et al., 2001(Shriberg et al., , p. 1099. ...
Linguistic prosody involves the rhythm and melody of speech. It implicitly enhances or modifies the explicit meaning of spoken words. The literature on linguistic pros-ody related to autism spectrum disorder deals both with the production and perception of a broad range of linguistic functions. These functions range from the formal encoding of grammatical features (e.g. lexical stress, syntactic structure) to the less formal, more intuitive signalling of pragmatic or interactional aspects (speech acts, information structure, turn-taking in conversation). This narrative review reports mixed results from 51 studies, with tentative evidence for greater differences in the perception of intuitive functions. Apart from considerable methodological differences across the different studies, much of the variability in the results is due to the wide range of ages investigated , since difficulties encountered by autistic children do not always persist into adulthood and compensatory strategies can be learnt for using prosody in communication.
... Precursors to vocal imitation are observed within days after birth (Chen et al., 2004;Meltzoff & Moore, 1983) and the development of adult-like oromotor skills continues past age 10 (see Kent & Vorperian, 1995). There is little information available regarding the developmental course of oromotor skills in ASD, although impairments of oral imitation have been reported as early as 26 months (Rogers et al., 2003), and oromotor differences remain through adulthood (Kissine & Geelhand, 2019;Shriberg et al., 2001). Furthermore, younger siblings of children diagnosed with ASD-who themselves have a heightened likelihood of receiving an ASD diagnosis (Zwaigenbaum et al., 2007)-often demonstrate delayed onset of developmental motor milestones (Iverson & Wozniak, 2007) and significant differences in fine motor skills at 12, 24, and 36 months compared to typically developing controls (Garrido et al., 2017), suggesting that similar deficits may be manifested in the oromotor system. ...
... Fourteen (21%) measured phonetic inventory either in imitation or from a spontaneous speech sample (Biller et al., 2022;Broome et al., 2021;Chenausky et al., 2016Chenausky et al., , 2021Chenausky, Nelson, & Tager-Flusberg, 2017;Chenausky, Norton, et al., 2022;Kim & Seung, 2015;Landa et al., 2013;Petinou, 2021;Schoen et al., 2011;Yoder et al., 2015), 11 (17%) examined speech rate or diadochokinetic rate (DDK; rapidly produced sequences of syllables) (Chenausky et al., 2019(Chenausky et al., , 2020(Chenausky et al., , 2021Deshmukh, 2012;Mahler, 2012;Mandelbaum et al., 2006;Nadig & Shaw, 2011;Patel et al., 2020;Shriberg et al., 2001Shriberg et al., , 2011Velleman et al., 2010), seven (11%) examined the consistency or stability of speech production (Chenausky et al., 2019(Chenausky et al., , 2020(Chenausky et al., , 2021Deshmukh, 2012;Gladfelter & Goffman, 2018;Mahler, 2012;Shriberg et al., 2011), six (9%) examined motor-related feeding/eating behaviors (Amato & Slavin, 1998;Brisson et al., 2012;McDaniel et al., 2018;Peterson et al., 2016Peterson et al., , 2019Yoder et al., 2015), five (8%) examined speech intelligibility (Gabig, 2008;Koegel et al., 1998;Lyakso et al., 2017;Petinou, 2021;Shriberg et al., 2001), five (8%) examined vocalization quality (Chenausky, Nelson, & Tager-Flusberg, 2017;Plumb & Wetherby, 2013;Schoen et al., 2011;Sheinkopf et al., 2000;Trembath et al., 2019), four (6%) examined resonance quality (Chenausky et al., 2019(Chenausky et al., , 2020(Chenausky et al., , 2021Shriberg et al., 2011), and three (5%) examined coarticulation (Chenausky et al., 2016(Chenausky et al., , 2020(Chenausky et al., , 2021. Speech sound duration (Sheinkopf et al., 2000) and motor anticipation (Brisson et al., 2012) were examined perceptually in one study each. ...
... Fourteen (21%) measured phonetic inventory either in imitation or from a spontaneous speech sample (Biller et al., 2022;Broome et al., 2021;Chenausky et al., 2016Chenausky et al., , 2021Chenausky, Nelson, & Tager-Flusberg, 2017;Chenausky, Norton, et al., 2022;Kim & Seung, 2015;Landa et al., 2013;Petinou, 2021;Schoen et al., 2011;Yoder et al., 2015), 11 (17%) examined speech rate or diadochokinetic rate (DDK; rapidly produced sequences of syllables) (Chenausky et al., 2019(Chenausky et al., , 2020(Chenausky et al., , 2021Deshmukh, 2012;Mahler, 2012;Mandelbaum et al., 2006;Nadig & Shaw, 2011;Patel et al., 2020;Shriberg et al., 2001Shriberg et al., , 2011Velleman et al., 2010), seven (11%) examined the consistency or stability of speech production (Chenausky et al., 2019(Chenausky et al., , 2020(Chenausky et al., , 2021Deshmukh, 2012;Gladfelter & Goffman, 2018;Mahler, 2012;Shriberg et al., 2011), six (9%) examined motor-related feeding/eating behaviors (Amato & Slavin, 1998;Brisson et al., 2012;McDaniel et al., 2018;Peterson et al., 2016Peterson et al., , 2019Yoder et al., 2015), five (8%) examined speech intelligibility (Gabig, 2008;Koegel et al., 1998;Lyakso et al., 2017;Petinou, 2021;Shriberg et al., 2001), five (8%) examined vocalization quality (Chenausky, Nelson, & Tager-Flusberg, 2017;Plumb & Wetherby, 2013;Schoen et al., 2011;Sheinkopf et al., 2000;Trembath et al., 2019), four (6%) examined resonance quality (Chenausky et al., 2019(Chenausky et al., , 2020(Chenausky et al., , 2021Shriberg et al., 2011), and three (5%) examined coarticulation (Chenausky et al., 2016(Chenausky et al., , 2020(Chenausky et al., , 2021. Speech sound duration (Sheinkopf et al., 2000) and motor anticipation (Brisson et al., 2012) were examined perceptually in one study each. ...
Oromotor functioning plays a foundational role in spoken communication and feeding, two areas of significant difficulty for many autistic individuals. However, despite years of research and established differences in gross and fine motor skills in this population, there is currently no clear consensus regarding the presence or nature of oral motor control deficits in autistic individuals. In this scoping review, we summarize research published between 1994 and 2022 to answer the following research questions: (1) What methods have been used to investigate oromotor functioning in autistic individuals? (2) Which oromotor behaviors have been investigated in this population? and (3) What conclusions can be drawn regarding oromotor skills in this population? Seven online databases were searched resulting in 107 studies meeting our inclusion criteria. Included studies varied widely in sample characteristics, behaviors analyzed, and research methodology. The large majority (81%) of included studies report a significant oromotor abnormality related to speech production, nonspeech oromotor skills, or feeding within a sample of autistic individuals based on age norms or in comparison to a control group. We examine these findings to identify trends, address methodological aspects hindering cross-study synthesis and generalization, and provide suggestions for future research.
... 2010), Ningsih (2017. Meskipun terdapat sekitar 70-80%, anak-anak ASD yang dapat memproduksi ujaran, tetapi ujaran yang dihasilkan memperlihatkan prosodi yang atipikal (Paul et al. (2005a); Rogers et al. (2006s); Shriberg et al. (2001). Uajaran yang diproduksi oleh anak-anak tersebut mengindikasikan perkembangan kemampuan berbahasa mereka (Baltaxe & Simmons, 1985;Depape, et al., 2012). ...
... Nilai-nilai akustik dari ujaran anak dengan gangguan autisme (ASD) merupakan hal penting untuk diketahui karena dapat menjelaskan indikasi abnormalitas yang berdampak pada kemampuan komunikasi sosial dan berorientasi pada gangguan (disorder). Kesulitan berkomunikasi yang terjadi pada anak tersebut akan mendapat perlakuan negatif dari lingkungan sekitarnya (Fay & Schuler, 1980;Van Bourgondien & Woods, 1992;Paul et al., 2005b;Shriberg, et al., 2001). Gangguan komunikasi dan interaksi semacam ini juga terjadi dalam rentang waktu yang lama dan akan berdampak pada kemampuan komunikasi sosial anak ASD tersebut. ...
... Durasi yang dihasilkan oleh subjek ASD tidak stabil, bahkan ada kecenderungan pemanjangan durasi pada silabel final. Kecenderungan ini dihubungkan dengan gangguan pada produksi final ujaran dan ketidakmampuan anak-anak ASD untuk menentukan batas-batas final ujaran (Shriberg et al., 2001). Verma dkk. (1994) menjelaskan bahwa variasi durasi dapat menjadi penanda sebuah prosodi, contohnya memperlambat atau mempercepat durasi dapat mengubah makna. ...
Suprasegmental elements or prosodic of research oriented to the measurement of speech signals and prosodic patterns. Research on prosody in autistic children has shown atypical or inappropriate prosody Ningsih (2017), Klin & Volkmar (1995); Ehlers & Gillberg (1993); Kanner, (1943). The research showed that the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often faced up the obstacles in producing the pitch, stress, and intonation. The purpose of this research is to find out prosodic patterns in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This research is using experimental phonetics as it’s method (Boersma dan Weenink, 2001). From this research it is found that the prosodic patterns described with sound wave and contours in Praat and result of the description are different and the differences are varied. The results showed that the subject of the study (ASD children) had indications of disturbances in producing contours. The prosody pattern tends to show a flat pattern. Abstrak Penelitian unsur suprasegmental atau prosodi bertujuan untuk menghitung sinyal bunyi ujaran dan pola prosodi. Penelitian prosodi pada anak autis menunjukkan prosodi atipikal atau tidak wajar Ningsih (2017), (Klin & Volkmar 1995); Ehlers & Gillberg (1993); Kanner, (1943). Penelitian tersebut menunjukkan bahwa anak dengan Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) mempunyai gangguan dalam memproduksi bunyi ujaran ( pitch , tekanan, dan intonasi). Tujuan penelitian ini adalah menemukan pola prosodi pada anak dengan ASD menggunakan perangkat lunak Praat (Boersma dan Weenink, 2001). Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan fonetik eksperimental. Dari penelitian ini ditemukan bahwa pola prosodi yang dideskripsikan melalui gelombang suara dan kontur intonasi pada Praat menunjukkan hasil deskripsi yang berbeda dan perbedaannya bervariasi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa subjek penelitian (anak ASD) mempunyai indikasi gangguan dalam memproduksi kontur ujaran. Pola prosodi yang dihasilkan cenderung menunjukkan pola mendatar (flat).
... A lack of difference between performances on the compound noun task suggests that this task was similarly challenging for both groups of children. Perhaps the mispronunciation task, which assesses prosodic awareness at the within-word level, requires more fine-tuned prosodic awareness skills, making it more challenging for the children who have documented differences with the prosodic aspects of speech (e.g., Shriberg et al., 2001). Interestingly, our participants performed notably higher (54% correct) compared to those (31.9% ...
Purpose
For non-autistic children, it is well established that linguistic awareness skills support their success with reading and spelling. Few investigations have examined whether these same linguistic awareness skills play a role in literacy development for autistic elementary school–age children. This study serves as a first step in quantifying the phonological, prosodic, orthographic, and morphological awareness skills of autistic children; how these skills compare to those of non-autistic children; and their relation to literacy performance.
Method
We measured and compared the phonological, prosodic, orthographic, and morphological awareness skills of 18 autistic (with average nonverbal IQs) and 18 non-autistic elementary school–age children, matched in age, nonverbal IQ, and real-word reading. The relations between linguistic awareness and the children's word-level literacy and reading comprehension skills were examined, and we explored whether the magnitude of these relations was different for the two groups. Regression analyses indicated the relative contribution of linguistic awareness variables to performance on the literacy measures for the autistic children.
Results
The non-autistic children outperformed the autistic children on most linguistic awareness measures. There were moderate-to-strong relations between performances on the linguistic awareness and literacy measures for the non-autistic children, and most associations were not reliably different from those for the autistic children. Regression analyses indicate that the performance on specific linguistic awareness variables explains unique variance in autistic children's literacy performance.
Conclusion
Although less developed than those of their non-autistic peers, the linguistic awareness skills of autistic elementary school–age children are important for successful reading and spelling.
... Research showed that infants can distinguish between speech and non-speech expression through prosody in the pre-language period (Brent & Siskind, 2001), which plays an important role in language acquisition. However, in the early stage, ASD children often show monotonous tone (Sharda et al., 2010), stress reduction (Shriberg Lawrence et al., 2001), flat intonation (Cooper & Hanstock, 2009) and other atypical prosodic patterns. By analyzing speech fragments collected from specific conversation tasks, the study found that ASD children had significantly higher speech loudness and pitch than TD children (Poornima & Kousalya, 2022), and in natural environments, TD children tended to show happy and surprised intonation emotions, while ASD children exhibited neutral, angry and disgust intonation (Asgari et al., 2021). ...
Purpose
With the increasing prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), the importance of early screening and diagnosis has been subject to considerable discussion. Given the subtle differences between ASD children and typically developing children during the early stages of development, it is imperative to investigate the utilization of automatic recognition methods powered by artificial intelligence. We aim to summarize the research work on this topic and sort out the markers that can be used for identification.
Methods
We searched the papers published in the Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, Medline, SpringerLink, Wiley Online Library, and EBSCO databases from 1st January 2013 to 13th November 2023, and 43 articles were included.
Results
These articles mainly divided recognition markers into five categories: gaze behaviors, facial expressions, motor movements, voice features, and task performance. Based on the above markers, the accuracy of artificial intelligence screening ranged from 62.13 to 100%, the sensitivity ranged from 69.67 to 100%, the specificity ranged from 54 to 100%.
Conclusion
Therefore, artificial intelligence recognition holds promise as a tool for identifying children with ASD. However, it still needs to continually enhance the screening model and improve accuracy through multimodal screening, thereby facilitating timely intervention and treatment.
... Third, there is a lack of analysis of the prosody of ASD speech when using SFPs. Individuals with ASD have prosodic problems in production and comprehension (Shriberg et al. 2001), unlike TD speakers who change the functions of the SFP per prosody (Oshima 2014a(Oshima , 2014b. Lastly, the mechanisms underlying such individual differences in SFP use must be probed. ...
... Following the DSM-IV-TR, AS comprised all the typical traits of the autistic triad but was typically not associated with delays in speech and cognitive development (2). It additionally included atypia of communicative behavior and special linguistic elements such as differing prosody or rhythm of speech (4). As a member of the group of pervasive development disorders, AS generally persists into adulthood. ...
Introduction
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that persists into adulthood with both social and cognitive disturbances. Asperger's syndrome (AS) was a distinguished subcategory of autism in the DSM-IV-TR defined by specific symptoms including difficulties in social interactions, inflexible thinking patterns, and repetitive behaviour without any delay in language or cognitive development. Studying the functional brain organization of individuals with these specific symptoms may help to better understand Autism spectrum symptoms.
Methods
The aim of this study is therefore to investigate functional connectivity as well as functional network organization characteristics using graph-theory measures of the whole brain in male adults with AS compared to healthy controls (HC) (AS: n = 15, age range 21–55 (mean ± sd: 39.5 ± 11.6), HC: n = 15, age range 22–57 [mean ± sd: 33.5 ± 8.5]).
Results
No significant differences were found when comparing the region-by-region connectivity at the whole-brain level between the AS group and HC. However, measures of “transitivity,” which reflect local information processing and functional segregation, and “assortativity,” indicating network resilience, were reduced in the AS group compared to HC. On the other hand, global efficiency, which represents the overall effectiveness and speed of information transfer across the entire brain network, was increased in the AS group.
Discussion
Our findings suggest that individuals with AS may have alterations in the organization and functioning of brain networks, which could contribute to the distinctive cognitive and behavioural features associated with this condition. We suggest further research to explore the association between these altered functional patterns in brain networks and specific behavioral traits observed in individuals with AS, which could provide valuable insights into the underlying mechanisms of its symptomatology.
... A number of the participants discussed how they found controlling the tone of their voice a struggle. Steven explored this in relation to communicating with partners: (Fay and Shuler, 1980;Shriberg et al, 2001). However, the stories of the participants suggest this aspect of speech is accentuated by being overwhelmed. ...
This article explores intimate relationships in the lives of young people (16-25) who are autistic and LGBT+. Using data collected from 15 participants, including interviews and diaries, the article explores how such relationships work in everyday life and the negotiations that occur. Friendships were highlighted as the most important relationships in the participants lives due to their flexibility and non-reliance on social scripts, unlike more intimate relationships which were leaden with expectation and presumption. However, the stories of the participants suggest that popularised conceptions of friendship are unhelpful and frame their relationships as deficient. There is a call for a more flexible approach to friendship which is inclusive of neurodivergency, and a recognition that existing models are exclusory.
Keywords:
Autism, Sexuality, Gender identity, LGBT+, intimacy, relationships, friendships.
... Similarly, Patel et al. (2020) found larger f0 excursion in utterance-final position, but it did not serve as a marker of autism to non-clinical listeners. However, in contrast to this, Shriberg et al. (2001) reported that over half of the autistic participants were rated as exhibiting unusual prosody while only about 6% in TD participants were rated the same. This finding was associated with differences in the mean f0 and f0 range between these two groups. ...
Phonetic entrainment is a phenomenon in which people adjust their phonetic features to approach those of their conversation partner. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been reported to show some deficits in entrainment during their interactions with human interlocutors, though deficits in terms of significant differences from typically developing (TD) controls were not always registered. One reason related to the inconsistencies of whether deficits are detected or not in autistic individuals is that the conversation partner’s speech could hardly be controlled, and both the participants and the partners might be adjusting their phonetic features. The variabilities in the speech of conversation partners and various social traits exhibited might make the phonetic entrainment (if any) of the participants less detectable. In this study, we attempted to reduce the variability of the interlocutors by employing a social robot and having it do a goal-directed conversation task with children with and without ASD. Fourteen autistic children and 12 TD children participated the current study in their second language English. Results showed that autistic children showed comparable vowel formants and mean fundamental frequency (f0) entrainment as their TD peers, but they did not entrain their f0 range as the TD group did. These findings suggest that autistic children were capable of exhibiting phonetic entrainment behaviors similar to TD children in vowel formants and f0, particularly in a less complex situation where the speech features and social traits of the interlocutor were controlled. Furthermore, the utilization of a social robot may have increased the interest of these children in phonetic entrainment. On the other hand, entrainment of f0 range was more challenging for these autistic children even in a more controlled situation. This study demonstrates the viability and potential of using human-robot interactions as a novel method to evaluate abilities and deficits in phonetic entrainment in autistic children.
... These AR cues were meant to inform the autistic wearer how to adjust their prosody to match normative conversational expectations. This prosodic visualization intervention aimed to provide awareness of a fat voice pattern that is perceived by neurotypicals as negative in a "naturalistic" environment [52]. Simply stated, the system prescribes curative behavior change to align with clinically established norms. ...
... The social communication deficits that characterize autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often include persistent difficulties using prosody effectively (McCann & Peppé, 2003). In fact, prosodic idiosyncrasies were included in Kanner's (1943) first description of autistic syndrome, and more recent studies have suggested that up to two thirds of individuals with ASD exhibit abnormal expressive prosody, including deviations from linguistic and cultural norms for syllable stress, phrasing, use of non-grammatical pauses, and speech loudness (e.g., McCann & Peppé, 2003;Shriberg et al., 2001). In addition to expressive prosodic deficits, previous research has also indicated that individuals with ASD can have difficulty recognizing how others use prosody to enhance speech content. ...
Idiosyncratic patterns of speech are common among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and can greatly affect their ability to participate successfully in various social and educational settings. We evaluated a treatment package with three children with ASD and a history of loud speech. A multiple baseline across participants design and a decibel meter application were used to evaluate whether the multi‐component intervention (i.e., a rule, differential reinforcement, and in vivo feedback) would effectively reduce participants' rates of loud speech. The results showed that the intervention decreased rates of loud speech for all participants. Results are discussed in terms of (a) their extension of the literature regarding speech prosody in ASD by demonstrating an effective intervention for loud speech, (b) clinical implications, and (c) potential future research regarding this nuanced, yet crucial aspect of social communication, including appropriate methods for addressing loud speech in individuals with ASD.
... The pioneer studies from Kanner (1943) and Asperger (1944) have found that the symptoms of ASD are highly correlated with atypical voice characteristics in speech production, and follow-up research further clarified that exaggerated or robot-like prosody is one of the prominent symptoms of ASD (Pronovost et al., 1966;Ornitz and Ritvo, 1976;Fay and Schuler, 1980;Tager-Flusberg, 1981;Simmons, 1985, 1992;Paul, 1987). In other words, individuals with ASD are prone to show atypical pitch and pitch variation (Sharda et al., 2010;Kaland et al., 2013;Fusaroli et al., 2017), inappropriate duration and intensity (Bonneh et al., 2011;Scharfstein et al., 2011;Diehl and Paul, 2013), as well as incorrect stress placement (Baltaxe and Guthrie, 1987;Shriberg et al., 2001). Among the abovementioned prosodic features, mean pitch and pitch range are considered to be reliable indicators in distinguishing between speakers with ASD and their typically developing (TD) comparisons through meta-analyses (Fusaroli et al., 2017), as significant differences in pitch are consistently reported in the literature (Sharda et al., 2010;Kaland et al., 2013;Filipe et al., 2014). ...
Speakers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are found to exhibit atypical pitch patterns in speech production. However, little is known about the production of lexical tones (T1, T2, T3, T4) as well as neutral tones (T1N, T2N, T3N, T4N) by tone-language speakers with ASD. Thus, this study investigated the height and shape of tones produced by Mandarin-speaking children with ASD and their age-matched typically developing (TD) peers. A pronunciation experiment was conducted in which the participants were asked to produce reduplicated nouns. The findings from the acoustic analyses showed that although ASD children generally produced both lexical tones and neutral tones with distinct tonal contours, there were significant differences between the ASD and TD groups for tone height and shape for T1/T1N, T3/T3N, and T4/T4N. However, we did not find any difference in T2/T2N. These data implied that the atypical acoustic pattern in the ASD group could be partially due to the suppression of the F0 range. Moreover, we found that ASD children tended to produce more errors for T2/T2N, T3/T3N than for T1/T1N, T4/T4N. The pattern of tone errors could be explained by the acquisition principle of pitch, similarities among different tones, and tone sandhi. We thus concluded that deficits in pitch processing could be responsible for the atypical tone pattern of ASD children, and speculated that the atypical tonal contours might also be due to imitation deficits. The present findings may eventually help enhance the comprehensive understanding of the representation of atypical pitch patterns in ASD across languages.
... Despite not having specific hypotheses related to subtype proportions in either group, there were several reasons to suspect that-if autistic participants were going to favor any 'like' subtype-they would show a preference for reformulation. Research finds increased rates of repetitions, reformulation, and/or revision in the speech of children on the spectrum when they are performing various language tasks, including storytelling and conversation (Irvine et al., 2016;Lake et al., 2011;Shriberg et al., 2001;Suh et al., 2014 6 ). Because discourse markers, specifically like, are one way a speaker can signal that they are struggling with word finding or formulating an upcoming thought (Swerts, 1998), this would suggest that autistic individuals, who have been shown in studies to frequently revise and repeat, would rely on the reformulation function of like. ...
Background & Aims: Discourse markers, such as well or like, serve a variety of functions to support conversational reciprocity: filling pauses, aiding word-finding, and modulating turn-taking by holding the conversational floor. Previous research shows that autistic individuals use discourse markers less frequently than non-autistic (NonAu) peers; however, the discourse marker like has not been included in that research, despite its ubiquitous use by NonAu individuals, and despite the fact that like serves important pragmatic functions that are not encoded by any other discourse marker. Specifically, like signals to the listener that the content of upcoming speech is 1) Important/new; 2) Loose/approximate; 3) Reformulative; or 4) Quotative. The current study addresses this gap in the literature by comparing the frequency of discourse marker like use between older autistic and non-autistic children as well as exploring patterns of usage between the four like functions.
Methods: Twenty-one 10-to-17-year-old children on the autism spectrum and 20 NonAu peers-statistically matched on age, sex, IQ and language scores-engaged in a semi-structured interview with a researcher. Uses of discourse-marker like were identified from written transcripts of interviews and each use was categorized into one of the four functions.
Results: There were no significant differences in like frequencies between groups, nor were there differences in relative proportions of functions used by each group.
Conclusions: Research consistently indicates that autistic individuals use discourse markers significantly less often than their NonAu counterparts, but the findings from our study suggest that this pattern does not persist to all such markers. This group of older autistic children use like as often as their peers and use it to signify similar information about upcoming speech to their listener.
Open Access Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23969415221129132
... Previous studies have shown that language behavior in autism differs from neurotypical (NT) patterns in a number of ways. For example, autistic children who are more severely impacted have been shown to produce less speech (Bone et al., 2014), slower speech (Parish-Morris et al., 2016;Bonneh et al., 2011), and speech with atypical voice quality compared to NT peers (Paul et al., 2005;Shriberg et al., 2001), including heightened jitter, increased jitter variability, but reduced harmonic-tonoise ratio (Bone et al., 2014). It has also been observed that autistic children's prosody differs from NT children, with qualitative observations ranging from "sing-songy" and exaggerated to monotonous, machine-like, or hollow (Bonneh et al., 2011;De-Pape et al., 2012;Lord et al., 1994;Wehrle et al., 2020;Fusaroli2017;Fusaroli2021). ...
This study examined differences in linguistic features produced by autistic and neurotypical (NT) children during brief picture descriptions, and assessed feature stability over time. Weekly speech samples from well-characterized participants were collected using a telephony system designed to improve access for geographically isolated and historically marginalized communities. Results showed stable group differences in certain acoustic features, some of which may potentially serve as key outcome measures in future treatment studies. These results highlight the importance of eliciting semi-structured speech samples in a variety of contexts over time, and adds to a growing body of research showing that fine-grained naturalistic communication features hold promise for intervention research.
Individuals with Asperger Syndrome (AS) often face difficulties in social communication and language skills, encompassing comprehension and production in both their first and second languages. English as a second language has been one of the most common communication tools and a school subject for decades in Asia; therefore, mastering English becomes crucial including individuals with AS. Prior studies on AS focused on first language development in adolescence. However, few explored second language learning especially the comprehension and oral production in preschoolers in a storytelling class-This study aimed to investigate the comprehension and oral production of a Taiwanese learner with AS in a storytelling setting. Data collection included a questionnaire, close-ended and open-ended questions related to storybooks, classroom observations, self-reports from the participant's mother, and clinical consultation documents. The study found that the participant with AS exhibited a higher level of interest in learning a second language, English, in storytelling classes. Moreover, he could comprehend the stories and answer related questions with a moderate to high degree of accuracy. These findings provide valuable insights for educators to guide and teach the second language within storytelling contexts to young learners with AS to not only motivate them but also support the young learners' development of comprehension and oral production in a second language.
A fundamental aspect of language processing is inferring others’ minds from subtle variations in speech. The same word or sentence can often convey different meanings depending on its tempo, timing, and intonation–features often referred to as prosody. Although autistic children and adults are known to experience difficulty in making such inferences, the science remains unclear as to why. We hypothesize that detail-oriented perception in autism may interfere with the inference process if it lacks the adaptivity required to cope with the variability ubiquitous in human speech. Using a novel prosodic continuum that shifts the sentence meaning gradiently from a statement (e.g., “It’s raining”) to a question (e.g., “It’s raining?”), we have investigated the perception and adaptation of receptive prosody in autistic adolescents and two groups of non-autistic controls. Autistic adolescents showed attenuated adaptivity in categorizing prosody, whereas they were equivalent to controls in terms of discrimination accuracy. Combined with recent findings in segmental (e.g., phoneme) recognition, the current results provide the basis for an emerging research framework for attenuated flexibility and reduced influence of contextual feedback as a possible source of deficits that hinder linguistic and social communication in autism.
Background and aims
Fascinations for or aversions to particular sounds are a familiar feature of autism, as is an ability to reproduce another person's utterances, precisely copying the other person's prosody as well as their words. Such observations seem to indicate not only that autistic people can pay close attention to what they hear, but also that they have the ability to perceive the finer details of auditory stimuli. This is consistent with the previously reported consensus that absolute pitch is more common in autistic individuals than in neurotypicals. We take this to suggest that autistic people have perception that allows them to pay attention to fine details. It is important to establish whether or not this is so as autism is often presented as a deficit rather than a difference. We therefore undertook a narrative literature review of studies of auditory perception, in autistic and nonautistic individuals, focussing on any differences in processing linguistic and nonlinguistic sounds.
Main contributions
We find persuasive evidence that nonlinguistic auditory perception in autistic children differs from that of nonautistic children. This is supported by the additional finding of a higher prevalence of absolute pitch and enhanced pitch discriminating abilities in autistic children compared to neurotypical children. Such abilities appear to stem from atypical perception, which is biased toward local-level information necessary for processing pitch and other prosodic features. Enhanced pitch discriminating abilities tend to be found in autistic individuals with a history of language delay, suggesting possible reciprocity. Research on various aspects of language development in autism also supports the hypothesis that atypical pitch perception may be accountable for observed differences in language development in autism.
Conclusions
The results of our review of previously published studies are consistent with the hypothesis that auditory perception, and particularly pitch perception, in autism are different from the norm but not always impaired. Detail-oriented pitch perception may be an advantage given the right environment. We speculate that unusually heightened sensitivity to pitch differences may be at the cost of the normal development of the perception of the sounds that contribute most to early language development.
Implications
The acquisition of speech and language may be a process that normally involves an enhanced perception of speech sounds at the expense of the processing of nonlinguistic sounds, but autistic children may not give speech sounds this same priority.
This study aimed to evaluate the effect of linguistic complexity and individual background variables (i.e. linguistic and cognitive abilities, degree of autistic traits, and sex) on speech disfluencies in autistic young adults and controls. Thirty-two 19- to 33-year-old autistic adults and 35 controls participated in this study. The frequency of disfluencies and stuttering severity were evaluated based on a narrative speech task. Linguistic complexity was assessed by evaluating the syntactic structures of the narratives. Cognitive and linguistic abilities were assessed using the General Ability Index (GAI), Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI) and Perceptual Reasoning Index (PRI) from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV. Autistic traits were measured using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Multiple-linear regression analyses (syntactic complexity, GAI, AQ, sex, and group status as predictors) showed that (a) syntactic complexity predicted total and stuttering-like disfluencies and stuttering severity, (b) GAI predicted typical disfluencies, and (c) sex predicted total, typical, and stuttering-like disfluencies. Additional correlation analyses revealed negative association between PRI and disfluencies in the control group but not in the autistic group. No connection was found between AQ and disfluencies. It seems that while some connections between disfluencies and individual cognitive features were found, some of the possible contributing factors for greater speech disfluency might differ between autistic and typical speakers.
Purpose: Autistic individuals often face challenges perceiving and expressing emotions, potentially stemming from differences in speech prosody. Here we explore how autism diagnoses between groups, and measures of social competence within groups may be related to, first, children’s speech characteristics (both prosodic features and amount of spontaneous speech), and second, to these two factors in mothers’ speech to their children. Methods: Autistic (n = 21) and non-autistic (n = 18) children, aged 7–12 years, participated in a Lego-building task with their mothers, while conversational speech was recorded. Mean F0, pitch range, pitch variability, and amount of spontaneous speech were calculated for each child and their mother. Results: The results indicated no differences in speech characteristics across autistic and non-autistic children, or across their mothers, suggesting that conversational context may have large effects on whether differences between autistic and non-autistic populations are found. However, variability in social competence within the group of non-autistic children (but not within autistic children) was predictive of children’s mean F0, pitch range and pitch variability. The amount of spontaneous speech produced by mothers (but not their prosody) predicted their autistic children’s social competence, which may suggest a heightened impact of scaffolding for mothers of autistic children. Conclusion: Together, results suggest complex interactions between context, social competence, and adaptive parenting strategies in driving prosodic differences in children’s speech.
Natural speech plays a pivotal role in communication and interactions between human beings. The prosody of natural speech, due to its high ecological validity and sensitivity, has been acoustically analyzed and more recently utilized in machine learning to identify individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In this meta-analysis, we evaluated the findings of empirical studies on acoustic analysis and machine learning techniques to provide statistically supporting evidence for adopting natural speech prosody for ASD detection. Using a random-effects model, the results observed moderate-to-large pooled effect sizes for pitch-related parameters in distinguishing individuals with ASD from their typically developing (TD) counterparts. Specifically, the standardized mean difference (SMD) values for pitch mean, pitch range, pitch standard deviation, and pitch variability were 0.3528, 0.6744, 0.5735, and 0.5137, respectively. However, the differences between the two groups in temporal features could be unreliable, as the SMD values for duration and speech rate were only 0.0738 and −0.0547. Moderator analysis indicated task types were unlikely to influence the final results, whereas age groups showed a moderating role in pooling pitch range differences. Furthermore, promising accuracy rates on ASD identification were shown in our analysis of multivariate machine learning studies, indicating averaged sensitivity and specificity of 75.51% and 80.31%, respectively. In conclusion, these findings shed light on the efficacy of natural prosody in identifying ASD and offer insights for future investigations in this line of research.
Purpose
We examined which measures of complexity are most informative when studying language produced in interaction. Specifically, using these measures, we explored whether native and nonnative speakers modified the higher level properties of their production beyond the acoustic–phonetic level based on the language background of their conversation partner.
Method
Using a subset of production data from the Wildcat Corpus that used Diapix, an interactive picture matching task, to elicit production, we compared English language production at the dyad and individual level across three different pair types: eight native pairs (English–English), eight mixed pairs (four English–Chinese and four English–Korean), and eight nonnative pairs (four Chinese–Chinese and four Korean–Korean).
Results
At both the dyad and individual levels, native speakers produced longer and more clausally dense speech. They also produced fewer silent pauses and fewer linguistic mazes relative to nonnative speakers. Speakers did not modify their production based on the language background of their interlocutor.
Conclusions
The current study examines higher level properties of language production in true interaction. Our results suggest that speakers' productions were determined by their own language background and were independent of that of their interlocutor. Furthermore, these demonstrated promise for capturing syntactic characteristics of language produced in true dialogue.
Supplemental Material
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24712956
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects approximately 1 in 100 children worldwide. Early diagnosis and family-clinician collaboration are crucial for effective intervention. Families often face difficulties accessing clinical services due to distance or logistics. The rise of COVID-19 has catalyzed the use of telehealth, offering remote health services, and mHealth technologies. Although beneficial, technology in ASD treatment requires specialized training and raises privacy concerns. Hence, a balanced approach combining in-person and tech-based interventions is needed for optimal ASD treatment.
Relatives of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may display milder social traits of the broader autism phenotype (BAP) providing potential endophenotypic markers of genetic risk for ASD. We performed a case–control comparison to quantify social cognition and pragmatic language difficulties in the BAP ( n = 25 cases; n = 33 controls) using the Faux Pas test (FPT) and the Goldman‐Eisler Cartoon task. Using deep phenotyping we then examined patterns of inheritance of social cognition in two large multiplex families and the spectrum of performance in 32 additional families (159 members; n = 51 ASD, n = 87 BAP, n = 21 unaffected). BAP individuals showed significantly poorer FPT performance and reduced verbal fluency with the absence of a compression effect in social discourse compared to controls. In multiplex families, we observed reduced FPT performance in 89% of autistic family members, 63% of BAP relatives and 50% of unaffected relatives. Across all affected families, there was a graded spectrum of difficulties, with ASD individuals showing the most severe FPT difficulties, followed by the BAP and unaffected relatives compared to community controls. We conclude that relatives of probands show an inherited pattern of graded difficulties in social cognition with atypical faux pas detection in social discourse providing a novel candidate endophenotype for ASD.
Although the clinical phenotypes of autism and schizophrenia
spectrum disorders are considered distinct, there are substantial
areas of overlap between both diagnoses. The two conditions co-occur disproportionately often, and research has begun to explore the impact of their simultaneous occurrence on clinically relevant
outcomes such as depression and quality of life. In this Review, we
describe what is known about the rates of co-occurrence between
autism and schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and delineate their
unique and shared neuropsychological features regarding sensory
processing, cognitive functioning (including language production) and social interactions. Despite this increasing body of literature, critical questions remain about how symptoms of autism and psychosis can best be differentiated, and which treatment options are best suited for people with co-occurring symptoms. We end by providing a research road map to direct efforts towards filling these knowledge gaps.
Background
Despite the large number of native Arabic speakers, Arabic prosodic skills have not been studied thoroughly.
Objectives
This study aimed to examine the perceptual judgment and acoustic characteristics of some elicited verbal prosodic patterns in a group of typically developing Egyptian children aged 2 years 2 months through 5 years 11 months in order to aid in the early identification of prosodic impairment in this age group.
Participants and methods
The sample included 40 healthy typically developing Egyptian children aged 2 years 2 months through 5 years 11 months old. Participants were divided into two groups: group I included 20 children aged 2 years 2 months to 3 years 11 months old. Group II included 20 children aged 4 years 2 months to 5 years 11 months old.
The prosodic patterns studied included socioaffective as well as grammatical patterns. The prosody of each elicited response was perceptually studied and acoustically analyzed. The results obtained were analyzed statistically using comparative and correlation studies.
Results
(a) Significant differences were found between the two groups with respect to the perceptual scores of all the prosodic patterns studied, except resentment and interrogative patterns. (b) Significant differences were found between the two groups with respect to acoustic values. (c) For all the studied parameters, no significant differences were found between males and females. (d) The highest mean perceptual score obtained by the studied group was that obtained for the interrogative pattern, whereas the lowest ones obtained were for exception and warning patterns. (e) A significant positive correlation was found between age and the Total Perceptual Prosodic Scores (TPPS). (f) A significant negative correlation was found between duration and most of the perceptual scores. (g) A significant positive correlation was found between frequency and most of the perceptual scores. (h) A significant positive correlation was found between energy and most of the perceptual scores.
Conclusion
(a) The production of different Arabic prosodic patterns is associated with changes in frequency, duration, and energy. (b) The easiest prosodic patterns to be imitated by children are the interrogative and resentment patterns, whereas the most difficult ones were the exception, disapproval, and warning patterns. (c) Elicited prosodic patterns do not differ with sex in children.
Typically developing children start using words around age 1 and develop conversational ability by 18 to 24 months. In autism, these communicative behaviors are delayed and impaired to varying degrees. Affected areas of language development include articulation, word use, syntax and morphology, echolalia (repetition with similar intonation of words/phrases someone else has said), and confusion of personal pronouns. Further research must address deficits in ability to process information about social situations, as this is most likely behind the communication disorders in autism.
Purpose:
Our study addresses three main questions: (a) Do autistics and neurotypicals produce different patterns of disfluencies, depending on the experimenter's direct versus averted gaze? (b) Are these patterns correlated to gender, skin conductance responses, fixations on the experimenter's face, alexithymia, or social anxiety scores? Lastly, (c) can eye-tracking and electrodermal activity data be used in distinguishing listener- versus speaker-oriented disfluencies?
Method:
Within a live face-to-face paradigm combining a wearable eye-tracker with electrodermal activity sensors, 80 adults (40 autistics, 40 neurotypicals) defined words in front of an experimenter who was either staring at their eyes (direct gaze condition) or looking elsewhere (averted gaze condition).
Results:
Autistics produce less listener-oriented (uh, um) and more speaker-oriented (prolongations, breath) disfluencies than neurotypicals. In both groups, men produce less um than women. Both autistics' and neurotypicals' speech are influenced by whether their interlocutor systematically looks at them in the eyes or not, but their reactions go in opposite directions. Disfluencies seem to primarily be linguistic phenomena as experienced stress, social attention, alexithymia, and social anxiety scores do not influence any of the reported results. Finally, eye-tracking and electrodermal activity data suggest that laughter could be a listener-oriented disfluency.
Conclusions:
This article studies disfluencies in a fine-grained way in autistic and neurotypical adults while controlling for social attention, experienced stress, and experimental condition (direct vs. averted gaze). It adds to current literature by (a) enlightening our knowledge of speech in autism, (b) opening new perspectives on disfluency patterns as important signals in social interaction, (c) addressing theoretical issues on the dichotomy between listener- and speaker-oriented disfluencies, and (d) considering understudied phenomena as potential disfluencies (e.g., laughter, breath).
Supplemental material:
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23549550.
This study describes the development and validation of Proso-Quest, a parental report of toddlers' prosodic skills that aims to assess early prosodic development in European Portuguese. The development and validation of Proso-Quest proceeded in three phases. Phase 1 was undertaken (a) to establish the structure of the parental report and select the items considering previous work, (b) to collect input from experts on prosodic development, and (c) to revise the report after a pilot study. Phase 2 examined internal consistency, reliability, test-retest reliability, and correlations between Proso-Quest and a valid measure of vocabulary development. Finally, Phase 3 evaluated the discriminant validity of this report in a clinical sample that frequently presents prosodic impairments. The psychometric properties of Proso-Quest indicated an excellent internal consistency, high test-retest reliability, significant correlations with a valid measure of vocabulary development, and sensitivity to identify prosodic delays. This parental report showed evidence of reliability and validity in describing early prosodic development and impairment, and it may be a useful tool in research and educational assessments, as well as in clinical-based assessments.
The substantial growth of Internet-of-Things technology and the ubiquity of smartphone devices has increased the public and industry focus on speech emotion recognition (SER) technologies. Yet, conceptual, technical, and societal challenges restrict the wide adoption of these technologies in various domains, including, healthcare, and education. These challenges are amplified when automated emotion recognition systems are called to function “in-the-wild” due to the inherent complexity and subjectivity of human emotion, the difficulty of obtaining reliable labels at high temporal resolution, and the diverse contextual and environmental factors that confound the expression of emotion in real life. In addition, societal and ethical challenges hamper the wide acceptance and adoption of these technologies, with the public raising questions about user privacy, fairness, and explainability. This article briefly reviews the history of affective speech processing, provides an overview of current state-of-the-art approaches to SER, and discusses algorithmic approaches to render these technologies accessible to all, maximizing their benefits and leading to responsible human-centered computing applications.
Background:
Speech articulation difficulties have not traditionally been considered to be a feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In contrast, speech prosodic differences have been widely reported in ASD, and may even be expressed in subtle form among clinically unaffected first-degree relatives, representing the expression of underlying genetic liability. Some evidence has challenged this traditional dichotomy, suggesting that differences in speech articulatory mechanisms may be evident in ASD, and potentially related to perceived prosodic differences. Clinical measurement of articulatory skills has traditionally been phoneme-based, rather than by acoustic measurement of motor control. Subtle differences in articulatory/motor control, prosodic characteristics (acoustic), and pragmatic language ability (linguistic) may each be contributors to differences perceived by listeners, but the interrelationship is unclear. In this study, we examined the articulatory aspects of this relationship, in speech samples from individuals with ASD and their parents during narration.
Method:
Using Speechmark® analysis, we examined articulatory landmarks, fine-grained representations of articulatory timing as series of laryngeal and vocal-tract gestures pertaining to prosodic elements crucial for conveying pragmatic information.
Results:
Results revealed articulatory timing differences in individuals with ASD but not their parents, suggesting that although potentially not influenced by broader genetic liability to ASD, subtle articulatory differences may indeed be evident in ASD as the recent literature indicates. A follow-up path analysis detected associations between articulatory timing differences and prosody, and subsequently, pragmatic language ability.
Conclusion:
Together, results suggest a complex relationship where subtle differences in articulatory timing may result in atypical acoustic signals, and serve as a distal mechanistic contributor to pragmatic language ability ASD.
This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.
Individuals high in autistic traits can have difficulty understanding verbal and non-verbal cues, and may display atypical gaze behaviour during social interactions. The aim of this study was to examine differences among neurotypical individuals with high and low levels of autistic traits with regard to their gaze behaviour and their ability to assess peers’ social status accurately. Fifty-four university students who completed the 10-item Autism Quotient (AQ-10) were eye-tracked as they watched six 20-second video clips of people (“targets”) involved in a group decision-making task. Simulating natural, everyday social interactions, the video clips included moments of debate, humour, interruptions, and cross talk. Results showed that high-scorers on the AQ-10 (i.e., those with more autistic traits) did not differ from the low-scorers in either gaze behaviour or assessing the targets’ relative social status. The results based on this neurotypical group of participants suggest that the ability of individuals high in autistic traits to read social cues may be preserved in certain tasks crucial to navigating day-to-day social relationships. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theory of mind, weak central coherence, and social motivation theories of autism.
Tämä artikkeli käsittelee autismikirjon varhaisnuorten puheen prosodian havaittua epätyypillisyyttä. Kyseessä on pilottitutkimus, jonka aineisto koostuu viiden 11-13-vuotiaan suomea äidinkielenään puhuvan autismikirjon pojan ja kuuden samanikäisen neurotyypillisen pojan puhenäytteistä. Puhenäytteet on kerätty spontaanista puheesta. Aineiston pohjalta koostettiin havaintokoe, jonka suoritti 50 neurotyypillistä yliopisto-opiskelijaa. Tulokset osoittavat, että neurotyypilliset aikuiset pitävät autismikirjon varhaisnuorten puheen prosodiaa epätyypillisempänä kuin samanikäisten neurotyypillisten verrokkien puheen prosodiaa. Epätyypillisyyden vaikutelma voi akustisten analyysien ja arvioijien kirjallisten vastausten perusteella aiheutua esimerkiksi laulunomaisesta tai poukkoilevasta sävelkulusta, katkonaisesta puherytmistä, suurista sävelkulun vaihteluista tai poikkeavan tasaisesta sävelkulusta. Epätyypillisyyden vaikutelmaa voivat korostaa mm. morfosyntaktiset ongelmat (kuten esimerkiksi väärät sijamuodot tai katkonaiset lauserakenteet), epäselvät sanat tai veltto artikulointi. Nariseva ääni, joka oli tavallinen piirre puhenäytteissä, ei sen sijaan kiinnittänyt arvioijien huomiota. Autismikirjon poikien puheen arveltiin usein olevan ei-syntyperäisen suomen puhujan tuottamaa, vaikka kaikki informantit olivat syntyperäisiä, yksikielisiä suomen puhujia. Arvioijien oli myös usein vaikeaa ymmärtää, mitä autismikirjon henkilöt sanoivat puhenäytteissä. Tutkimuksen tulokset kasvattavat tietoisuutta prosodisista erityispiirteistä suomenkielisillä autismikirjon varhaisnuorilla.
Background:
Impairments in prosody (e.g., intonation, stress) are among the most notable communication characteristics of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and can significantly impact communicative interactions. Evidence suggests that differences in prosody may be evident among first-degree relatives of autistic individuals, indicating that genetic liability to ASD is expressed through prosodic variation, along with subclinical traits referred to as the broad autism phenotype (BAP). This study aimed to further characterize prosodic profiles associated with ASD and the BAP to better understand the clinical and etiologic significance of prosodic differences.
Method:
Autistic individuals, their parents, and respective control groups completed the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C), an assessment of receptive and expressive prosody. Responses to expressive subtests were further examined using acoustic analyses. Relationships between PEPS-C performance, acoustic measurements, and pragmatic language ability in conversation were assessed to understand how differences in prosody might contribute to broader ASD-related pragmatic profiles.
Results:
In ASD, receptive prosody deficits were observed in contrastive stress. With regard to expressive prosody, both the ASD and ASD Parent groups exhibited reduced accuracy in imitation, lexical stress, and contrastive stress expression compared to respective control groups, though no acoustic differences were noted. In ASD and Control groups, lower accuracy across several PEPS-C subtests and acoustic measurements related to increased pragmatic language violations. In parents, acoustic measurements were tied to broader pragmatic language and personality traits of the BAP.
Conclusion:
Overlapping areas of expressive prosody differences were identified in ASD and parents, providing evidence that prosody is an important language-related ability that may be impacted by genetic risk of ASD.
Purpose:
The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of speech disfluencies in autistic young adults and controls by using a wide-range disfluency classification of typical disfluencies (TD; i.e., filled pauses, revisions, abandoned utterances, and multisyllable word and phrase repetitions), stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD; i.e., sound and syllable repetitions, monosyllable word repetitions, prolongations, blocks, and broken words), and atypical disfluencies (AD; i.e., word-final prolongations and repetitions and atypical insertions).
Method:
Thirty-two autistic young adults and 35 controls completed a narrative telling task based on socially complex events. Frequencies of total disfluencies, TD, SLD, AD and stuttering severity were compared between groups.
Results:
The overall frequency of disfluencies was significantly higher in the autistic group and significant between-group differences were found for all disfluency categories. The autistic group produced significantly more revisions, filled pauses, and abandoned utterances, and each subtype of SLD and AD than the control group. In total, approximately every fourth autistic participants scored at least a very mild severity of stuttering, and every fifth produced more than three SLD per 100 syllables.
Conclusions:
Disfluent speech can be challenging for effective communication. This study revealed that the speech of autistic young adults was highly more disfluent than that of the controls. The findings provide information on speech disfluency characteristics in autistic young adults and highlight the importance of evaluating speech disfluency with a wide-range disfluency classification in autistic persons in order to understand their role in overall communication. The results of this study offer tools for SLPs to evaluate and understand the nature of disfluencies in autistic persons.
This chapter is directed towards therapists’ actions in group sessions involving French- and Finnish-speaking preadolescent boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). On the one hand, the focus is on how two therapists orient the group towards achieving meaningful learning outcomes with regard to the topic of conversation. The analysis concentrates on the therapists’ output or response strategies when they orient the group discussion and assess speech produced by the children, either validating it or parts of it or inviting them to provide more valid input. The results show that although a specific response category may have many functions, the aim of all of them is to maintain intersubjectivity among the participants (Wiklund & Määttä, 2021). On the other hand, the chapter discusses the therapists’ teaching orientations. The results of the analyses suggest that prosodic skills are often overlooked in group sessions and that the focus of the sessions tends, implicitly or explicitly, to be on the general norms of social interaction and embodied social interaction (Wiklund & Stevanovic, 2018).
‘Prosody’ encompasses phenomena related to aspects of speech such as melody, rhythm, stress, phrasing, pauses, and voice quality. These are related to pitch (voice fundamental frequency, f0), loudness (intensity), duration (timing), and speech rate. Prosodic phenomena are ‘suprasegmental’. In other words, they typically involve units of at least one syllable in length. The results of a study by Wiklund et al. (forthcoming) proved both experimentally and statistically that neurotypical Finnish-speaking adults find the prosody of preadolescent, Finnish-speaking boys with ASD more atypical than the prosody of age- and gender-matched controls. In general, the speech samples of the ASD individuals were rated as significantly more atypical than the samples of the control group. Potential causes of the perception of atypicality include the following prosodic features: sing-song pitch, bouncing pitch, disconnected speech rhythm, large pitch excursions, and flat pitch. It is noteworthy that these features surprisingly often gave the impression of a non-native accent. Wiklund (2016) demonstrates that the most common prosodic feature related to trouble-source turns causing comprehension problems in interaction between preadolescents with ASD and neurotypical adults is a creaky voice. A quiet voice and large pitch excursions are also relatively frequent. It is noteworthy that even if the trouble-source turns often carry certain prosodic features in these data and these features may contribute to the creation of the repair sequence, in very few cases do prosodic features seem to be the main cause of the comprehension problem (Lehtinen, 2012; Wiklund, 2016). The results of a study by Wiklund et al. (2021) show that speakers with ASD can use utterance-final pitch rises as an interactional resource. Indeed, they can call for other participants’ reactions and indicate that they take other participants into account with the help of utterance-final pitch rises (Routarinne, 2003). They can also ‘recycle’ prosody, that is, repeat the prosody of a previous speaker. In addition, the informants can correctly produce and interpret prosodic features indicating finality in a spontaneous interaction. They can also emphasise words with the help of stress and changes in intonation.
Speech disfluencies interrupt the continuous flow of speech and may thus present challenges for conversational interaction. In fluent speech, there are few interruptions, and listeners can concentrate on the contents of the speech without being disturbed by the manner in which the speech is produced. ‘Disfluency’ refers to the interruption of ongoing speech and exhibits features such as silent and filled pauses, sound prolongations, repetitions, and cut-off utterances. According to the studies presented in this chapter, the durational mean proportions of disfluencies and ungrammatical expressions are greater in the speech of participants with ASD (26.4%) than in the control group (15.5%) (Wiklund & Laakso, 2020). Individual variation in the amount of disfluency is high within both groups. In addition, a qualitative difference can be found: The boys with ASD produce long and complex disfluent turns with word searches, self-repairs, false starts, fillers, sound prolongations, inconsistent syntactic structures, and grammatical errors, whereas the control group members mainly produce fillers and sound prolongations. In the conversational interactions of the speakers with ASD, disfluencies also cause comprehension problems; the control group members, in turn, do not experience comprehension problems (Wiklund & Laakso, 2019, 2020).
Purpose
Audio-visual presentations – delivered either in real-life or virtually – feature heavily in educational assessments and employer recruitment. This study explored neurodivergent undergraduate students' experiences of presentations. The aim was to understand how neurodivergent students describe experiences of presentations in educational and workplace contexts and how neurodivergent students experienced training, support activities and learning technologies associated with presentations.
Design/methodology/approach
An exploratory qualitative phenomenological approach was taken, from students' perspectives. Overall, 12 neurodivergent undergraduate students (M age = 21.89 years, SD age = 2.57; nine women, two men, one non-binary) discussed their experiences of presentations within educational and/or professional contexts via semi-structured remote interviews. The sample included individuals with diagnoses of anxiety, depression, dyslexia, borderline personality disorder, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, and panic disorder.
Findings
Thematic Analysis of interview transcript data revealed four main themes (with sub-themes in parentheses): Control (preparedness; delivery); Audience Perceptions and Behaviours (expectations of “normality”; shared knowledge; audience “expertise”); Intervention Efficacy (early access; individuality; learning technologies) and Value of Presentation Skills (reciprocity between education – workplace; self-efficacy; self-esteem; learner development).
Research limitations/implications
The dataset was extracted from a relatively small sample from a single university and indeed a single academic discipline. Furthermore, the dataset was collected during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic – although this gives us a valuable snapshot of students' experiences and perceptions during this time, whether the author can extrapolate these findings in future is unclear.
Practical implications
The findings help understand how we better support students. Better ways to support learners can be developed in developing presentation and audience skills. This research shows that alternative assessment provisions must be based on individuals and their own specific needs and skills, rather than their divergence label. This research can inform the development of digital learning technologies.
Social implications
This research can inform how educators, coaches, trainers, and facilitators “train” audiences to be more inclusive and less prejudicial/biased. We can understand how to better construct social spaces for presentations, in the classroom and the world of work.
Originality/value
This report presents a valid and valuable methodological approach, conducted and reported transparently. This research was conducted during a crucial, unprecedented and precarious time period for learners and education professionals. Implications are considered with respect to the design of teaching, learning and assessment activities; facilitator, learner, and peer behaviours; the role of digital learning technologies; and employment/employability.
Introduction Atypical prosodic features have been widely reported in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), primarily in non-tonal language speakers. Nevertheless, the prosodic realizations in autistic people who speak tonal languages were relatively understudied. This study aimed to investigate the acoustic and phonetic patterns at the word-level speech in Mandarin-speaking autistic and typically developing (TD) children at different age ranges.
Methods Thirty Mandarin-speaking autistic children (15 three- to five-year-olds and 15 six- to eight-year-olds) were recruited into the ASD group. The TD group consisted of 30 age- and gender-matched children. We employed a picture-naming task to elicit the spontaneous speech production of Mandarin disyllabic words in which tone change processes occur, namely Tone 3 (T3) sandhi and neutral tone (T0).
Results The phonetic analysis showed that the ASD group generally could produce typical-like T3 sandhi and T0 in terms of pitch height. However, relative to the TD group, they exhibited flatter pitch contours during T3 sandhi production. Moreover, the acoustic pitch mean of citation tones in the ASD group was also significantly higher, accompanied by more rigid pitch curves in contour tones. In addition, the atypical temporal realization in the ASD group was manifested by the longer duration of T0 and the earlier inflection position of T3.
Conclusions Mandarin-speaking autistic children under eight had the phonological ability to produce context-dependent tones based on connected tonal information at the word level. Nevertheless, their phonetic prosodic realization of tone change processes was atypical. Our findings provide evidence of atypical prosody in autistic children who speak tone languages. Clinically, these findings may be attributable to underlying neural differences in autistic children.
In response to uncovering brain mechanisms underlying vocal communication and searching for biomarkers for mental illnesses, speech prosody has been increasingly studied in recent years in multiple disciplines, including psycholinguistics. In this article, we provide an up-to-date synthesis of the theoretical foundation and empirical evidence to profile linguistic and emotional prosody in the proper characterization of mental disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's disease, and depression. Our review reveals a need to develop theoretically motivated and methodologically integrated approaches to the study of context-driven comprehension and expression of pragmatic-affective prosody, which will help elucidate the core features of socio-communicative problems in individuals with mental disorders. We propose that comprehensive models within and across the conventional cognition-emotion-language trichotomy need to be developed to integrate current findings and guide future research. In particular, there needs to be due emphasis on investigating multisensory and cross-modal effects in normal and pathological prosody research. Our review calls for multidisciplinary efforts to address the challenging issues to inform and inspire the advancement of linguistic theories and psychiatric diagnosis and treatment.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 9 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Background
Emotional prosody provides acoustical cues that reflect a communication partner’s emotional state and is crucial for successful social interactions. Many children with autism have deficits in recognizing emotions from voices, however the neural basis for these impairments is unknown. Here we examine brain circuit features underlying emotional prosody processing deficits and their relation to clinical symptoms of autism.
Methods
We used an event-related fMRI task to measure neural activity and connectivity during processing of sad and happy emotional prosody and neutral speech in 22 children with autism and 21 matched control children (7-12 years old). We employed functional connectivity analyses to test competing theoretical accounts which attribute emotional prosody impairments to either sensory processing deficits in auditory cortex or theory of mind deficits instantiated in temporoparietal junction (TPJ).
Results
Children with autism showed specific behavioral impairments for recognizing emotions from voices. They also showed aberrant functional connectivity between voice-sensitive auditory cortex and bilateral TPJ during emotional prosody processing. Neural activity in bilateral TPJ during processing of both sad and happy emotional prosody stimuli was associated with social communication impairments in children with autism. In contrast, activity and decoding of emotional prosody in auditory cortex was comparable between autism and control groups and did not predict social communication impairments.
Conclusions
Our findings support a social-cognitive deficit model of autism by identifying a role for TPJ dysfunction during emotional prosody processing. Our study underscores the importance of “tuning in” to vocal-emotional cues for building social connections in children with autism.
Purpose
This study used a cross-sequential design to identify developmental changes in narrative speech rhythm and intonation. The aim was to provide a robust, clinically relevant characterization of normative changes in speech prosody across the early school-age years.
Method
Structured spontaneous narratives were elicited annually from 60 children over a 3-year period. Children were aged 5–7 years at study outset and then were aged 7–9 years at study offset. Articulation rate, prominence spacing, and intonational phrase length and duration were calculated for each narrative to index speech rhythm; measures of pitch variability and pitch range indexed intonation. Linear mixed-effects (LME) models tested for cohort-based and within-subject longitudinal change on the prosodic measures; linear regression was used to test for the simple effect of age-in-months within year on the measures.
Results
The LME analyses indicated systematic longitudinal changes in speech rhythm across all measures except phrase duration; there were no longitudinal changes in pitch variability or pitch range across the school-age years. Linear regression results showed an increase in articulation rate with age; there were no systematic differences between age cohorts across years in the study.
Conclusions
The results indicate that speech rhythm continues to develop during the school-age years. The results also underscore the very strong relationship between the rate and rhythm characteristics of speech and so suggest an important influence of speech motor skills on rhythm production. Finally, the results on pitch variability and pitch range are interpreted to suggest that these are inadequate measures of typical intonation development during the school-age years.
Bu çalışmanın amacı, 20 yılı aşkın sürede OSB olan çocuklara duyguları anlama ve ifade etme, sözel ifade, yüz ifadeleri, jestler ve tonlama bileşenlerinden oluşan sosyal tepki davranışlarının öğretimine yönelik müdahalelerin etkisini sınayan çalışmaları; demografik, yöntem ve bulgu değişkenleri açısından inceleyerek kapsamlı bir betimsel analiz yapmaktır. Bir üniversitenin toplu veri tabanlarında, anahtar kelimeler kullanılarak ilk tarama yürütülmüştür. Taramadaki 112 çalışmaya kaynakçaların gözden geçirilmesi ile iki çalışma daha eklenerek toplamda 114 çalışmaya ulaşılmıştır. Bu çalışmalar dahil etme ölçütleri olarak (a) Ocak 2000-Mayıs 2020 yılları arasında yürütülmesi, (b) hakemli dergilerde İngilizce ve Türkçe dillerinden biriyle yayımlanması, (c) katılımcılardan en az birinin OSB tanısının olması, (d) nicel ve nitel araştırma yöntemleriyle tasarlanması ve (e) sosyal tepki davranışlarından (sözel ifade, yüz ifadesi, jestler, tonlama) en az birinin öğretiminin hedeflenmesi açısından incelenmiştir ve 36 çalışma araştırma kapsamına alınmıştır. Çalışmanın sonucunda, son yıllardaki çalışmalarda farklı yaşlarda olan OSB olan bireylere, tüm sosyal tepki davranışlarının öğretimi için çoğunlukla ve etkili olarak teknoloji temelli uygulamaların kullanıldığı görülmüştür. Araştırmanın bulguları tartışılarak ileri araştırmalara yönelik önerilerde bulunulmuştur.
Although speaking in noisy environments is a common occurrence, few studies have investigated how noise affects language production beyond the acoustic level. In seeking to differentiate between speaker- and listener-oriented modifications, this study examines the effect of noise on the complexity of language production and examines whether cognitive control predicts noise-induced modifications. Participants completed a picture description task via videoconferencing software while both the speaker (the participant) and listener (the experimenter) were exposed to multi-talker babble. Speakers produced fewer T-units, clauses, and words as well as fewer, but longer, unfilled pauses in noise. Degree of reduction in number of clauses, words, and unfilled pauses was significantly associated with weaker cognitive control. Thus, we consider these modifications to be speaker-oriented, driven by the distracting nature of noise. However, participants also produced fewer filled pauses and mazes in noise. These modifications were not significantly correlated with cognitive control, and they diverge from prior work demonstrating that speakers tend to produce more disfluencies when they alone shoulder the burden of a noisy environment. This pattern of results suggests speakers may alter their speech to alleviate cognitive burden on themselves as well as to facilitate comprehension for their listener.
This tutorial presents an overview of prosody and its application to specific language impairment. First, prosody is defined as both a phonological and acoustic phenomenon. Prosody is further explored through a review of research concerning perception and production of prosody in the normally developing child and in the child with specific language impairment. The tutorial concludes with a discussion of clinical implications and directions for future research.
In a previous study, we demonstrated that listeners were highly successful in identifying the intended meaning of spoken ditropic sentences (those which may carry either a literal or an idiomatic meaning) when speakers were instructed to convey the distinction. The present communication reports on acoustic and phonetic analyses carried out with the goal of identifying cues that distinguished the literal and idiomatic utterances. Certain prosodic differences were observed. Literal utterances were systematically longer than idioms. This was partly due to increased use of pauses, as well as to increased duration of major lexical items. Moreover, literal sentences were typically characterized by greater numbers of pitch contours (discernible rise-fall excursions of fundamental frequency) and open junctures than were idiomatic utterances. In addition to suprasegmental contrasts, articulatory distinctions—corresponding to lento-allegro phonological rules—were also observed.
These distinctions directly reflect the structural differences intrinsic to the two types of utterances. A literal sentence is formulated by the organization of constituent words and phrases. Idioms, on the other hand, are holistic units, largely nontransparent to syntactic structure or the usual meaning of the lexical members.
The abilities of autistic, schizophrenic, and normal‐control children to label four emotional intonations (the emotional task) in speech were tested, along with a linguistic task. All stimuli were pretested on normal adults. Older (≥ 8 years of age) normal children performed as well as adults on both tasks; younger normal children and both younger and older autistic children performed poorly on the emotional task; children (all older) diagnosed as schizophrenic were not significantly impaired in either task. Mental age was not correlated with performance in autistic children. The relevance of these results to other findings regarding emotional and linguistic behaviors in normal and disabled children is considered.
The objective of this paper was to employ a functional linguistic approach to explore pragmatic failure in the spontaneous speech of subjects with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD). Patterns of intonation use were compared among subjects with Asperger's syndrome (AS), high-functioning autism (HFA), and psychiatric out-patient controls (OPC) with a variety of non-specific social problems. Written transcripts and audio-recordings were used to measure rates of various intonation types relative to the amount of speech produced. The major finding of the study was that the HFA subjects less often tend to employ useful patterns of intonation for communication than the AS or OPC groups. This suggests that HFA either send random intonation signals to hearers or else demonstrate systematic misuse of the linguistic system. AS subjects differed little from the controls. The implications of these results for understanding the communicative failure of PDD subjects is discussed.
There has been recent interest in the role of prosody in language acquisition as well as in adult sentence processing. Although the specific questions about prosody asked in these two domains may appear to differ, there are at least three basic issues that they have in common. These include the role of prosody in segmentation (i.e., deciding whether two adjacent sections of speech belong to the same or to different linguistic units), structural bracketing (i.e., discerning structural relations among linguistic units), and the reliability of prosodic cues. Data from both language acquisition and adult parsing research suggest that, although prosody almost certainly plays a role in segmentation, it probably does not aid in bracketing. Research on the reliability of prosodic cues suggest that these are probably more reliable and robust in child-directed than in adult-directed speech registers, raising questions about how child and adult listeners interpret the presence vs. absence of prosodic cues.
The Prosody-Voice Screening Profile (PVSP) is a clinical research instrument that quantifies 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 defined 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 findings to date for several typically speaking and clinical populations.
A continuum of vocational options is needed to meet the wide variety of vocational needs of adults with autism. Just as various educational settings are needed, from the highly structured and specialized to complete mainstreaming, vocational settings follow the same continuum. Sheltered workshops that serve as training and work sites for many developmentally disabled adults represent the most specialized option. Competitive employment in regular jobs in the community is at the other end of the continuum. Given the nature of autism, the most successful options are likely to be ones developed with the autistic individual in mind and where there is some degree of continuous support. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the factors critical to successful employment and two vocational options being developed in North Carolina—supported employment, and the integrated vocational and residential program of the Carolina Living and Learning Center. The vocational models described include the job coach, enclave, mobile crew, and small-business models of supported employment, as well as a model where the vocational program is physically and programmatically integrated with the residential program. Each of these programs will be discussed in terms of the critical elements, and relative strengths and weaknesses, of the model.
Following its identification by Leo Kanner in 1943, autism was viewed as an emotional handicap caused by inadequate mothering. Few questioned this assumption for several decades. This conception of autism led to many inappropriate interventions based on psychoanalytic principles. Among the most inappropriate and destructive of these were the group and individual therapeutic interventions directed toward these children and their families (Schopler & Mesibov, 1984). Many of the families that participated in these programs vividly remember them and their associated feelings of guilt and ineptitude.
We address explanatory issues raised by prior findings on the prosody-voice characteristics of suspected apraxia of speech in children (AOSc). Prosody-voice patterns for 14 adults with apraxia of speech (AOS) were compared to the prosody-voice patterns of 14 children with suspected apraxia of speech and inappropriate stress (AOSci) using the same assessment instruments and analysis methods. Compared to the speakers with AOSci, speakers with AOS had significantly fewer utterances meeting criteria for inappropriate stress, and significantly more utterances meeting criteria for inappropriate phrasing and inappropriate rate of speech. Discussion focuses on the implications of these three dissociations for the psycholinguistic locus of the stress deficit in AOSci including candidate loci within linguistic, motor speech, and self-monitoring processes.
Deficits in prosody have been consistently described as an integral part of the speech and language disorder in autistic children (Kanner, 1946; Ornitz & Ritvo, 1976). Such deficits still remain evident in the language characteristics of children whose speech showed considerable improvement over time (DeMyer, Barton, DeMyer, Norton, Allen, and Steele, 1973; Rutter & Lockyer, 1967; Baltaxe & Simmons, 1983). However, there is still a paucity of research investigating the deficits in this important aspect of speech and language. The present review is an effort to summarize prosodic studies in autism and to consider the findings to date in terms of what is known about prosody in normal language acquisition and in language pathology. Finally, we will present some speculation on how the prosodic deficits might fit into the general picture of the autistic language disturbance and brain dysfunction.
Two prior studies in this series (Shriberg, Aram, & Kwiatkowski, 1997a, 1997b) address the premise that children with developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) can be differentiated from children with speech delay (SD) on the basis of one or more reliable differences in their speech. The first study compared segmental and prosody-voice profiles of a group of 14 children with suspected DAS to profiles of 73 children with SD. Results suggest that the only linguistic domain that differentiates some children with suspected DAS from those with SD is inappropriate stress. The second study cross-validated these findings, using retrospective data from a sample of 20 children with suspected DAS evaluated in a university phonology clinic over a 10-year period.
The present study is of particular interest because it cross-validates the prior stress findings, using conversational speech samples from 19 children with suspected DAS provided by five DAS researchers at geographically diverse diagnostic facilities in North America. Summed across the three studies, 52% of 48 eligible samples from 53 children with suspected DAS had inappropriate stress, compared to 10% of 71 eligible samples from 73 age-matched children with speech delay of unknown origin.
Discussion first focuses on the implications of stress findings for theories of the origin and nature of DAS. Perspectives in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and developmental biolinguistics lead to five working hypotheses pending validation in ongoing studies: (a) inappropriate stress is a diagnostic marker for at least one subtype of DAS, (b) the psycholinguistic loci of inappropriate stress in this subtype of DAS are in phonological representational processes, (c) the proximal origin of this subtype of DAS is a neurogenically specific deficit, (d) the distal origin of this form of DAS is an inherited genetic polymorphism, and (e) significant differences between acquired apraxia of speech in adults and findings for this subtype of DAS call into question the inference that it is an apractic, motor speech disorder. Concluding discussion considers implications of these findings for research in DAS and for clinical practice.
21 autistic and 21 nonautistic mentally retarded (MR) adolescents and young adults (aged 12–25 yrs), individually matched for chronological age and verbal mental age (MA) based on performance on the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS), together with a group of normal young children (aged 4–21 yrs), individually matched for verbal MA, were tested for their ability to name photographs of emotionally expressive faces and emotion-unrelated photographs of objects, and to name corresponding sounds recorded on audiotape. Results indicate that although BPVS-matched autistic and nonautistic MR Ss were not significantly different when the emotion tasks were considered in isolation, autistic Ss differed from nonautistic MR and normal Ss in being relatively poor at naming feelings vis-à-vis naming nonpersonal objects. There was evidence that group differences between nonautistic MR and normal Ss were not specific to the task of naming emotions. This raises doubt about claims that nonautistic MR individuals have specific deficits in emotion recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Anyone who's ever listened to, read, or transcribed an unedited sample of spontaneous speech is aware that perfectly articulate speakers are in short supply. Whether spoken by language impaired children or politicians, spontaneous language typically contains disruptions of what Clark and Clark (1977) termed the "ideal delivery." Psycholinguists have long viewed such disruptions as valuable clues to covert processes that culminate in the production of an utterance. For example, hesitation phenomena (e.g. filled and silent pauses) have been interpreted as evidence that the speaker is encountering significant information profit processing issues. Approaches to the analysis of utterance disruptions are reviewed, and a system is proposed for analyzing disruptions in spontaneous language, with four disruption categories (pauses, repetitions, revisions, and orphans). Use of the system is illustrated using language samples from 10 traumatically brain-injured and 10 normally developing speakers (ages 7-20). Language: en
Prosody is an important component of communication that interacts with the other aspects of language (i.e., syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and segmental phonology). Attention to prosody affords clinicians a better understanding of children's language impairments. Brewster's (1989) system for classifying prosody deficits is a promising framework for clinical management. It provides insight into the child's adaptive use of prosody as it interacts with language and speech.
(C) 1997 Aspen Publishers, Inc.
Child prosody is important clinically, but descriptive procedures are lacking. Here, a broad descriptive framework is presented. The approach is based on systemic phonology, although other current models are mentioned. Information on English prosody and speaker usage is presented. Speech samples are used to show how utterances are broken down into prosodic units (tone group, foot, syllable, phoneme). Discourse influences the manner in which morphemes and syllables are produced. Language interaction occurs between grammatical and prosodic units. Tone, stress, rhythm, and pause are considered. English stress is key to the organization of speech. Speech-language pathologists would benefit from more training in prosody analysis and transcription for clinical purposes.
(C) 1997 Aspen Publishers, Inc.
Relatively able children with autism were compared with age- and language-matched controls on assessments of (1) familiar voice-face identity matching, (2) familiar face recognition, and (3) familiar voice recognition. The faces and voices of individuals at the children's schools were used as stimuli. The experimental group were impaired relative to the controls on all three tasks. Face recognition and voice recognition correlated significantly with voice-face identity matching, but not with each other, suggesting that the recognition impairments jointly cause the matching impairment. Neither chronological age nor verbal mental age were consistently related to the recognition and matching impairments.
The destinies of the eleven children first reported in 1943 as suffering from autistic disturbances of affective contact are brought up to date. Their life histories are summarized succinctly in terms of developmental data, family constellations, clinical observations in the course of the years, the varieties of professional planning, and present status. Attention is called to the subsequent scientific studies of early infantile autism with ever-increasing facilities for research in nosology, biochemical and general systemic implication, and therapeutic amelioration. The need for continued follow-up studies of autistic children is emphasized.
Asperger syndrome (AS) is a pervasive developmental disorder recently introduced as a new diagnostic category in the ICD-10 and the DSM-IV. Along with motor clumsiness, pedantic speech has been proposed as a clinical feature of AS. However, few attempts have been made to define and measure this symptom. We studied 17 patients with AS (ICD-10; 14 male, 3 female; mean age 16.4 years, mean full-scale IQ 97) and compared them with a control group of 13 patients with normal-intelligence autism or high-functioning autism (HFA) (ICD-10/DSM-III-R; 12 male, 1 female; mean age 15.5 years, mean full-scale IQ 81.2). An operational definition of pedantic speech was formulated and a rating scale devised. 13 (76%) of the AS patients were rated as pedantic compared to 4 (31%) of the HFA group (
2=6.3;p=.01). Results suggest that pedantic speech is common in AS and may help differentiate AS from high-functioning autism.
Linguistically, sentences contain both Given information (what the listener is expected to know already) and New information (what the listener is not expected to know already). According to a proposed Given-New Strategy, the listener, in comprehending a sentence, first searches memory for antecedent information that matches the sentence's Given information; he then revises memory by attaching the New information to that antecedent. To provide evidence for this strategy, we presented subjects with pairs of sentences, where the first (the context sentence) provided a context for the second (the target sentence). The subjects were required to press a button when they felt they understood the target sentences. Consistnet with the proposed strategy, Experiment I showed that a target sentence with a definite noun phrase presupposing existence took less time to comprehend when its Given information had a direct antecedent in the context sentence than when it did not. Experiment II ruled out a repetition explanation for Experiment I, and Experiment III demonstrated the same phenomenon for target sentences containing the adverbs still, again, too, and either.
Three children who were selected to represent varieties of developmental, belated and autistic echolalia were followed at bimonthly intervals for repeated assessments of echoic output and verbal comprehension. In addition to comparing their performances as reflected by these measures, qualitative differences of the echolalia, per se, were examined. Characteristics, linguistic and paralinguistic, which differentiated the autistic echolalia from that spoken by the other two children were discussed in terms of both traditional affect-related explanations and a contrary language-related rationale emanating from the study and from the literature.
The syndrome of childhood autism is typified by major abnormalities in language development, yet there are few systematic descriptions of autistic children's linguistic systems. We have, therefore, begun a comprehensive investigation of the language of verbal autistic children and concentrate in this paper on comparing the syntax used by 10 verbal autistic children matched for nonlinguistic mental age with a group of mentally retarded subjects and normal controls. Two different means of assessing syntactic development were utilized: Lee's Developmental Sentence analysis and Chomsky's Transformational analysis. The autistic group was found to rank significantly lower than either the mentally retarded or the normal groups in terms of Developmental Sentence Scores. When a transformational grammar was used to describe the language samples of our subjects the autistic children were typified by a higher error rate and lower level of complexity compared to the other two groups. However, the results also indicate that the grammatical system of autistic children is rule-governed and probably not unlike that of young normal or retarded children. In conclusion, it appears that the syntactic abnormalities characteristic of autism are attributable to an extreme delay in language development as well as to an impaired ability to make use of linguistic rules.
A review of the pertinent literature indicates that autistic children are likely to show normal but delayed development of speech sounds. In contrast, atypical phonological development is suggested by experiments demonstrating that autistic subjects are deficient in their ability to extract the components of structured auditory input. A systematic investigation of the speech sound systems of verbal autistic and mentally retarded children reveals a delay in phoneme acquisition, as well as a relative uniformity of error types in both groups. The autistic subjects, however, differ significantly from the mentally retarded in the phonemic substitutions which they make. Autistic subjects are also characterized by a high correlation between frequency of phonological errors and level of overall language development. The findings are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that the autistic group shows a more global delay in language development.
A sample of boys aged from 5 to 10 yr with no demonstrable neurological dysfunction, hearing loss or mental retardation, who had a current severe developmental disorder of the understanding of spoken language were examined using standard psychological tests of cognitive, linguistic and social behaviour, together with a standardized interview administered to the parents. Results showed that within this group children diagnosed as autistic had a more deviant language development than nonautistic children, had a more severe comprehension defect, had a more extensive language disability (in that it involved several different modalities), and also showed a defect in the social usage of the language they possessed. There were very few differences in the pattern of nonlinguistic skills, and it is concluded that a language disability is probably necessary for the development of the behavioural syndrome of autism.
The language samples of seven verbal autistic adolescents were analyzed. Linguistic deficits were compared to characteristics reported for preteen autistics and described structurally. Only four subjects demonstrated linguistic impairments. These clustered primarily in the area of prosodic features, semantic cooccurrence constraints and general disfluency. No such clustering had been reported for the preteen population. No correlation between linguistic deficits, IQ, and age was found. However, performance on the Seashore Test for Musical Ability correlated highly with linguistic performance. Results suggest that (a) autism includes liguistically, and possibly etiologically, distinct subtroups; (b) the basic linguistic deficits in autism may be more specific than thought previously; and (c) perception of prosodic features may be crucial for decoding and encoding linguistic signals. Autistic children may be lacking in this ability.
Autism is a childhood disorder diagnosed primarily in the presence of severe social unresponsiveness in the first 3 years of life (Volkmar, 1987). Since speech exerts a prepotent attraction on the attention of normally developing infants, hence facilitating social engagement, we designed a technique to examine whether this inborn reaction could be at fault in young autistic children. They were given a choice between their mothers' speech and the noise of superimposed voices (a sound effect obtained in a busy canteen). Data were obtained utilizing a specially designed automated and computerized device which recorded the children's responses in their own homes. In contrast to comparison groups of mentally retarded and normally developing children who showed the expected strong preference for their mothers' speech, the autistic children actively preferred the alternative sound or showed a lack of preference for either audio segment. These results suggest that such abnormal reactions to speech are a feature of these children's overall disregard to people.
Following a discussion of the various aspects and types of prosody, the literature relevant to its neuroanatomy and neuropsychology in normal, brain-injured, and psychiatric populations is reviewed. Evidence linking neurophysiologic mechanisms with components of prosody is presented.
Audio-recorded continuous speech samples from forty 20-50-year-old noninstitutionalized persons with mental retardation were selected from a database of 192 samples. Descriptive data on segmental and suprasegmental characteristics were obtained using close phonetic transcription as input to linguistic analyses software. For this sample of adults with mental retardation, speech and prosody status were not statistically associated with gender or gross level of mental retardation, but were associated with estimated probability of independent living. Speech and prosody analyses and content analyses of transcribers' comments yielded diacritic-level profiles of these speakers' linguistic and paralinguistic behaviors in continuous speech. Additional analyses of the error data tested alternative sources of processing involvement within a four-stage speech production model. A cognitive capacity constraint, which limits the speaker's ability to allocate resources to phonological encoding, is proposed as a sufficient explanation for the obtained pattern of token-to-token inconsistency of articulation. An additional sociolinguistic constraint is hypothesized to account for reduced prosodic and paralinguistic competence in continuous discourse. Both constraints are amenable to intervention programming. Findings fail to support the view that the potential for long-term speech prosody competence in individuals with mental retardation is limited by speech-motor constraints. Discussion includes intervention considerations in the context of current trends in special education.
Primary sentence stress is an important aspect of the English prosodic system. Its adequate use is a prerequisite in the development of normal intonation patterns. This study examined the use of primary sentence stress in autistic children with mean length of utterance (MLU) scores between 1.9 and 4.1 morphemes. Normal and aphasic subjects at similar MLU levels served as contrast groups. The primary sentence task required that the subjects verbally respond to a request for information and provide a description of a play situation. Toy manipulation was used to elicit the desired responses. Listener judgment served as the basis for analyzing results. Although all subjects were able to perform the task, differences were seen in the number of correct responses and in the pattern of stress misassignment. These results are at variance with a prediction of stress placement on grammatical grounds. An explanation is offered, based on pragmatic considerations and cognitive developmental trends in young children.
Synopsis
Autistic and non-autistic mentally retarded adolescents and young adults were individually matched for age and verbal ability and were given tasks in which they chose photographs of faces for emotionally expressive voices, and photographs of non-emotional things or events to accompany recorded sounds. The results were that relative to control subjects, autistic individuals performed less well on the emotion tasks than on the non-emotion tasks. The findings suggest that autistic individuals have a disability in recognizing bodily expressions of emotion, and that there is a degree of task-specificity to this impairment.
The ability to comprehend and produce the stress contrast between noun compounds and noun phrases (e.g., greenhouse vs. green house) was examined for 8 nonfluent aphasics, 7 fluent aphasics, 7 right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients, and 22 normal controls. The aphasics performed worse than normal controls on the comprehension task, and the RHD group performed as well as normals. The ability to produce stress contrasts was tested with a sentence-reading task; acoustic measurements revealed that no nonfluent aphasic used pitch to distinguish noun compounds from phrases, but two used duration. All but one of the RHD patients and all but one of the normals produced pitch and/or duration cues. These results suggest that linguistic prosody is processed by the left hemisphere and that with brain damage the ability to produce pitch and duration cues may be dissociated at the lexical level.
Research and literature on communication problems of autistic individuals have identified specific pragmatic deficiencies. This preliminary study focused upon describing autistic children's verbal performance in regard to the pragmatic ability of encoding new versus old information. Four autistic children with MLUs of 1.96–2.82 were videotaped on two occasions in interactions with their teachers or speech-language pathologists. All of the subjects' referential utterances, including referential echolalic utterances, were categorized as the encoding of new or old information. Two prominent means that speakers used for encoding new versus old information were examined: the encoding of new information through single-word utterances (i.e., a lexicalization strategy) and the use of contrastive stress to highlight new information in multiword utterances.
The results revealed that the 4 subjects did encode new information through lexicalization in single-word utterances and through contrastive stress in multiword utterances. However, the subjects encoded old information almost as frequently as they encoded new information. The encoding of a new action or state change was marked relatively infrequently by the subjects, and they consistently produced repetitions of previously encoded information when they failed to offer new information to their listeners. The results are discussed in reference to cognitive processing patterns of autistic individuals.
A follow-up study involving 85 autistic boys and 35 girls, c. 5 1/2 years of age at initial evaluation and 12 years at follow-up, is presented and discussed in considerable detail. Measures, also applied to 26 non-psychotic subnormal controls, included speech, social, educational, and family adequacy ratings, IQ's, and neurological data. Most autistic children remained educationally retarded and 42% were institutionalized. Good agreement with 2 studies by other authors indicated the following prognosis in autism: 1–2% recovery to normal, 5–15% borderline, 16–25% fair, and 60–75% poor. The best predictor of functional capacity in a work/school setting was the child's rating at intake. Performance IQ and severity of illness were next to best predictors. Case histories of 20 children with the best outcome, including 2 functioning normally, are compared and analyzed. Also, etiological implications of results are outlined in support of theories linking the cause of autism to biological factors.
A case study approach used informal and controlled clinical observations and analyses of tape recordings during a two year period to develop detailed descriptions of the speech behavior, language comprehension, and general functioning of fourteen institutionalized children diagnosed autistic or atypical. In speech behavior, the children could be classified as a talking group, from whom identifiable words were heard, or a vocalization group, from whom phonations were heard without any resemblance to words. The talking group's speech was composed almost entirely of echolalia or delayed echolalia. The vocalization group produced prolonged, monotonal, syllabic type vocalizations (consonant-vowel combinations) at extremes of high and low pitch and loudness levels with deviant voice quality. Reaction to the spoken language of adults by both groups seemed to be limited to a form of conditioned response to the total situation (i.e., to gestural, tonal, or situational clues) with no readily identifiable linguistic comprehension. The responses of the children to visual and auditory stimuli were strongly indicative of cognitive and perceptual dysfunction.
Studies in child language have shown that contrastive stress appears to be an early developing device to mark the topic-comment distinction, and thus is important for the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge. This study examined the use of contrastive stress by autistic children with mean-length-of-utterance (MLU) scores between 1.9 and 4.1 morphemes. Normal and aphasic subjects at similar MLU levels served as contrast groups. The contrastive stress task required that the subjects verbally assess the counterfactual nature of a presupposition in a yes-no question. Toy manipulation was used to elicit the desired responses in a play situation. Listener judgment served as the basis for analyzing results. Although all subject groups were able to perform the task, differences were seen in the number of correct responses and the patterns of stress misassignment .
We studied patients with damage of either the right (RHD) or left hemisphere (LHD) and control subjects to determine whether the RHD patients had a global or limited prosodic defect. Compared with LHD patients and controls, RHD subjects had decreased comprehension of emotional prosody. Both LHD and RHD groups had more impaired comprehension of propositional prosody than controls, but the RHD and LHD groups did not differ. The right hemisphere, therefore, seems to be dominant for comprehending emotional prosody but not propositional prosody.
This paper provides a review of studies conducted on linguistic functioning in autistic children, within the framework developed in normal language acquisition research. Despite certain methodological weaknesses, the research consistently shows that phonological and syntactic development follow the same course as in normal children and in other disordered groups, though at a slowed rate, while semantic and pragmatic functioning may be specially deficient in autism. These findings are related to other recent studies on the relative independence of different aspects of language.
Several aspects of echolalic speech produced by five autistic children were investigated. We found that the incidence of echolalia was influenced by the type of question addressed to the child and, to a lesser extent, by the child's comprehension of the specific relationships expressed in the question. Additionally, acoustic analysis showed that a substantial proportion of echoes involved a prosodic modification of the examiner's question. Further analyses indicated that some of these modified echoes represent more than just a primitive conversational strategy. Specifically, they seem to reflect a higher level of processing and serve a semantic function, that of affirming the examiner's question.
Describes the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R), a revision of the Autism Diagnostic Interview, a semistructured, investigator-based interview for caregivers of children and adults for whom autism or pervasive developmental disorders is a possible diagnosis. The revised interview has been reorganized, shortened, modified to be appropriate for children with mental ages from about 18 months into adulthood and linked to ICD-10 and DSM-IV criteria. Psychometric data are presented for a sample of preschool children.
This study investigated the production of different types of speech pauses and repairs in the story narratives produced by autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children, matched on verbal mental age. Ten children in each group were asked to tell the story depicted in a wordless picture book. The narratives were analyzed for frequency of grammatical (between phrase) and nongrammatical (within phrase) pauses, and for several measures of story length and complexity. The main results were that children with autism produced significantly fewer nongrammatical pauses, and that their nongrammatical pausing was correlated with measures of story length and complexity. These findings suggest that the stories told by the autistic children reflect reduced cognitive and communicative demand. The implications of this study for future research on the use of a variety of prosodic characteristics as measures of social cognitive deficit in autism are discussed.
Research in developmental phonological disorders, particularly emerging subgroup studies using behavioral and molecular genetics, requires qualitative and continuous measurement systems that meet a variety of substantive and psychometric assumptions. This paper reviews relevant issues underlying such needs and presents four measurement proposals developed expressly for causal-correlates research. The primary qualitative system is the Speech Disorders Classification System (SDCS), a 10-category nosology for dichotomous and hierarchical polychotomous classification of speech disorders from 2 years of age through adulthood. The three quantitative measures for segmental and suprasegmental analyses are (a) the Articulation Competence Index (ACI), an interval-level severity index that adjusts a subject's Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC) score for the relative percentage of distortion errors; (b) Speech Profiles, a series of graphic-numeric displays that profile a subject's or group's severity-adjusted consonant and vowel-diphthong mastery and error patterns; and (c) the Prosody-Voice Profile, a graphic-numeric display that profiles a subject's or group's status on six suprasegmental domains divided into 31 types of inappropriate prosody-voice codes. All data for the four measures are derived from one sample of conversational speech, which obviates the limitations of citation-form testing; enables speech assessment as a qualitative, semi-continuous, and continuous trait over the life span; and provides a context for univariate and multivariate statistical analyses of phonetic, phonologic, prosodic, and language variables in multiage, multidialectal, and multicultural populations. Rationale, procedures, validity data, and examples of uses for each measure are presented.
A companion paper includes rationale for the use of 10 metrics of articulation competence in conversational speech (Shriberg, Austin Lewis, McSweeny, & Wilson, 1997). The present paper reports lifespan reference data for these measures using records from a total of 836 3- to 40(+)-year-old speakers with normal and disordered speech. The reference data are subdivided by diagnostic classification based on extensions to an instrument titled the Speech Disorders Classification System (SDCS; Shriberg, 1993). Appendices provide procedural information on the SDCS and statistical rationale for the reference data.
Research in normal and disordered phonology requires measures of speech production that are biolinguistically appropriate and psychometrically robust. Their conceptual and numeric properties must be well characterized, particularly because speech measures are increasingly appearing in large-scale epidemiologic, genetic, and other descriptive-explanatory database studies. This work provides a rationale for extensions to an articulation competence metric titled the Percentage of Consonants Correct [PCC; Shriberg & Kwiatkowski, 1982; Shriberg, Kwiatkowski, Best, Hengst, & Terselic-Weber, 1986], which is computed from a 5- to 10-minute conversational speech sample. Reliability and standard error of measurement estimates are provided for 9 of a set of 10 speech metric including the PCC. Discussion includes rationale for selecting one or more of the 10 metrics for specific clinical and research needs.
The first aim of this study was to determine if there was a significant perceptual asymmetry for syntactic prosody and if it differed from the perceptual asymmetry for emotional prosody. The second aim of this study was to determine if the observed asymmetries were the product of task demands or stimulus features. Experiment 1 consisted of a Syntactic task and an Emotional task. In the Syntactic task, subjects identified Statement and Question prosody in dichotically presented sentences. In the Emotional task, subjects identified Angry and Sad prosody in dichotically presented sentences. There was a significant left ear advantage for the Emotional task and no significant ear advantage for the Syntactic task. In Experiment 2, subjects had to perform an Emotional prosody task with the syntactic Statement and Question prosody stimuli from Experiment 1. There was a significant left ear advantage, indicating that the perceptual asymmetry was determined by task demands and not stimulus features.
The goal of the current study was to construct a reference database against which misarticulations of /s/ can be compared. Acoustic data for 26 typically speaking 9- to 15-year-olds were examined to resolve measurement issues in acoustic analyses, including alternative sampling points within the /s/ frication; the informativeness of linear versus Bark transformations of each of the 4 spectral moments of /s/ (Forrest, Weismer, Milenkovic, & Dougall, 1988); and measurement effects associated with linguistic context, age, and sex. Analysis of the reference data set indicates that acoustic characterization of /s/ is appropriately and optimally (a) obtained from the midpoint of /s/, (b) represented in linear scale, (c) reflected in summary statistics for the 1 st and 3rd spectral moments, (d) referenced to individual linguistic-phonetic contexts, (e) collapsed across the age range studied, and (f) described individually by sex.
Acoustics tasks to assess lexical and sentential stress
- L D Shriberg
- J R Green
- H B Karlsson
- J L Mcsweeny