Purpose This study aimed to identify the nature and extent of receptive and expressive prosodic deficits in children with high-functioning autism (HFA). Method Thirty-one children with HFA, 72 typically developing controls matched on verbal mental age, and 33 adults with normal speech completed the prosody assessment procedure, Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children. Results Children with HFA performed significantly less well than controls on 11 of 12 prosody tasks ( p < .005). Receptive prosodic skills showed a strong correlation ( p < .01) with verbal mental age in both groups, and to a lesser extent with expressive prosodic skills. Receptive prosodic scores also correlated with expressive prosody scores, particularly in grammatical prosodic functions. Prosodic development in the HFA group appeared to be delayed in many aspects of prosody and deviant in some. Adults showed near-ceiling scores in all tasks. Conclusions The study demonstrates that receptive and expressive prosodic skills are closely associated in HFA. Receptive prosodic skills would be an appropriate focus for clinical intervention, and further investigation of prosody and the relationship between prosody and social skills is warranted.

Previous research using electropalatography (EPG) has shown that a distinctive articulatory characteristic of lingual consonants in the speech of school-age children with articulation/phonological disorders (APD) is a high amount of tongue-palate contact. Consonants produced in this way have been referred to as undifferentiated lingual gestures. This article reviews the EPG literature on undifferentiated gestures with 4 overarching goals: (a) to provide a precise articulatory description of undifferentiated gestures, (b) to estimate the rate of occurrence of undifferentiated gestures in children with APD, (c) to propose an original.interpretation of undifferentiated gestures, and (d) to discuss the significance of the gestures in the light of current theories of APD. Undifferentiated gestures typically occur during productions of lingual consonant targets and are characterized by contact that lacks clear differentiation between the tongue apex, tongue body, and lateral margins of the tongue. The EPG literature reports 17 school-age children with APD, of whom 12 (71%) show evidence of undifferentiated gestures. Standard transcriptions do not reliably detect undifferentiated gestures, which are transcribed as speech errors (e.g., phonological substitutions, phonetic distortions) in some contexts, but are transcribed as correct productions in other contexts. Undifferentiated gestures are interpreted as reflecting a speech motor constraint involving either delayed or deviant control of functionally independent regions of the tongue. The limitations of the current EPG literature are stated, and the need for research into undifferentiated gestures in preschool children is discussed.

Marion (2005) Prosody and its relationship to language in school-aged children with high-functioning autism. Accessed from:http://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/141/ Repository Use PolicyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profit purposes providing that:• The full-text is not changed in any way • A full bibliographic reference is made • A hyperlink is given to the original metadata page in eResearch eResearch policies on access and re-use can be viewed on our This series consists of unpublished "working" papers. They are not final versions and may be superseded by publication in journal or book form, which should be cited in preference.All rights remain with the author(s) at this stage, and circulation of a work in progress in this series does not prejudice its later publication.Comments to authors are welcome. AbstractDisordered expressive prosody is a widely reported characteristic of the speech of individuals with autism. Despite this, it has received little attention in the research literature and the few studies that have addressed it have not described its relationship to other aspects of communication. This study investigated the prosody and language skills of 31 children with high functioning autism. The children completed a battery of speech, language and nonverbal assessments and a procedure for assessing receptive and expressive prosody.Language skills varied, but the majority of children had deficits in at least one aspect of language with expressive language most severely impaired. All of the children had difficulty with at least one aspect of prosody and prosodic ability correlated highly with expressive and receptive language.

S The technique of electropalatography (EPG) records the location and timing of tongue contacts with the hard palate during continuous speech. Recent developments in hardware and software design of the Reading electropalatograph are described and applications of the technique in assessment and remediation of a variety of speech disorders are outlined. In assessment, it is shown that EPG can provide insights into possible origins of auditorily perceived errors, and case descriptions illustrate how this information can lead to a more rationalised approach to treatment. In therapy, the provision of real‐time visual feedback of tongue movement can be effective in the remediation of certain types of intractable speech problems. Finally, the importance of techniques such as EPG in the objective evaluation of treatment procedures is discussed in the light of the increasing demand for accountability within the speech therapy service. La technique de l'electropalatographie (EPG) permet d'enregistrer la position du lieu de contact entre la langue et le palais pendant la parole. Le développement récent en hardware et software de l'EPG est décrit dans cet article et des applications de cette technique pour l'évaluation et la rééducation de différents troubles de la parole sont présentées. Pour l'évaluation, il est montré que l'EPG peut aider à trouver des explications aux erreurs perçues à l'oreille, et la description de cas illustre comment ces données peuvent mener à une approche du traitement plus rationnelle. En thérapie, la présentation en temps réel d'un retour visuel du mouvement de la langue peut être efficace pour certains types de troubles de la parole intraitables. Finalement, l'importance des techniques telles que l'EPG dans l'évaluation objective des procédures de traitement est discutée à la lumière de l'exigence croissante pour plus de rationnalité dans les services d'orthophonie. Die Elektropalatografie (EPG) ermöglicht die Aufnahme der Stelle und die Zeitabmessung der Zungenkontakte mit dem Gaumen beim laufenden Sprechen. Wir beschreiben neuere Entwicklungen im Hard‐ und Software der Readinger‐EPG; die Anwendung bei der Bewertung und Behandlung verschiedener Sprechstörungen wird im Umriß dargestellt. Wir zeigen, daß die EPG bei der Bewertung eine Einsicht in den möglichen Ursprung eines auditiv wahrgenommenen Fehlers ermöglicht, und durch Fallbeschreibungen wird illustriert, wie diese Daten zu einer rationalisierten Behandlung führen. Wir beschreiben, wie das Vorhandensein eines realtime, visuellen Feedbacks der Zungenbewegungen bei der Therapie bestimmter, unlenksamer Sprechstörungen wirkungsvoll sein kann. Schließlich besprechen wir, mit Hinsicht auf das zunehmende Verlangen nach Verantwortlichkeit bei der Logopädie, die Wichtigkeit von Techniken wie die EPG bei der objektiven Bewertung von Therapieverfahren.

Individuals with cleft palate, even those with adequate velopharyngeal function, are at high risk for disordered lingual articulation. This article attempts to summarise current knowledge of abnormal tongue-palate contact patterns derived from electropalatographic (EPG) data in speakers with cleft palate. These data, which have been reported in 23 articles published over the past 20 years, have added significantly to our knowledge about cleft palate speech. Eight abnormal patterns of tongue-palate contact are described and illustrated with data from children and adults with repaired cleft palate. The paper also discusses some of the problems in interpreting EPG data from speakers with abnormal craniofacial anatomy and emphasises the importance of quantifying relevant aspects of tongue-palate contact data.Areas of research requiring further investigation are outlined.

This study involved a qualitative analysis of speech errors in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Participants were 69 children aged 5-13 years; 30 had high functioning autism and 39 had Asperger syndrome. On a standardised test of articulation, the minority (12%) of participants presented with standard scores below the normal range, indicating a speech delay/ disorder. Although all the other children had standard scores within the normal range, a sizeable proportion (33% of those with normal standard scores) presented with a small number of errors.Overall 41% of the group produced at least some speech errors.The speech of children with ASD was characterised by mainly developmental phonological processes (gliding, cluster reduction and final consonant deletion most frequently), but nondevelopmental error types (such as phoneme specific nasal emission and initial consonant deletion) were found both in children identified as performing below the normal range in the standardised speech test and in those who performed within the normal range. Nondevelopmental distortions occurred relatively frequently in the children with ASD and previous studies of adolescents and adults with ASDs shows similar errors, suggesting that they do not resolve over time. Whether or not speech disorders are related specifically to ASD, their presence adds an additional communication and social barrier and should be diagnosed and treated as early as possible in individual children. Speech in ASD 3Articulation and phonology skills are often a relative strength in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), with most studies reporting either age-appropriate or superior speech compared to other expressive language abilities (Rapin & Dunn, 2003). Kjelgaard and TagerFlusberg (2001, p. 287) studied 89 children with ASD and concluded that "among the children with autism there was significant heterogeneity in their language skills, but across all the children, articulation skills were spared". An earlier study by Boucher (1976) reached a similar conclusion. She used the Edinburgh Articulation Test (Anthony, Bogle, Ingram, & McIsaac, 1971) to compare articulation in children with autism, delayed language development and receptive dysphasia. The results showed that the children with autism had superior articulation compared to the children in the other two groups.However, a recent study by Rapin et al. (2009) has shown that a significant proportion of children with ASD do present with impaired speech. They used standard scores from an articulation test to drive cluster analysis of language abilities in 62 school-aged children with ASD (mean age 8;6) and proposed two main types of language disorders in this age group: severe impairment in expressive phonology (24%) and borderline/normal phonology with impaired comprehension (76%). Since there was no analysis of the actual errors made by the children it is not possible to know whether they were presenting with a delayed or disordered profile.Some earlier studies suggest th...

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Children with high-functioning autism are widely reported to show deficits in both prosodic and pragmatic ability. New procedures for assessing both of these are now available and have been used in a study of 31 children with high-functioning autism and 72 controls. Some of the findings from a review of the literature on prosodic skills in individuals with autism are presented, and it is shown how these skills are addressed in a new prosodic assessment procedure, PEPS-C. A case study of a child with high-functioning autism shows how his prosodic skills can be evaluated on the prosody assessment procedure, and how his skills compare with those of controls. He is also assessed for pragmatic ability. Results of both assessments are considered together to show how, in the case of this child, specific prosodic skill-levels can affect pragmatic ability