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.

Research in this area has covered mostly prosodic expression, although some more recent studies cover comprehension, processing and the relationship of receptive prosodic ability to theory of mind. Findings conflict and methodology varies greatly.

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metadata page in eResearch eResearch policies on access and re-use can be viewed on our This series consists of unpublished "working" papers. They are not final versions and may be superseded by publication in journal or book form, which should be cited in preference.All rights remain with the author(s) at this stage, and circulation of a work in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.

A procedure for assessing prosody and intonation in children (PEPS-C: Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems--Children), suitable for use by clinicians with both children and adults, is described. The procedure includes testing of four communication areas in which intonation/prosody has a crucial role: interaction, affect, boundary (chunking) and focus. Each area has parallel tasks for assessing understanding and expression of the functions and ability to discriminate and articulate the prosodic forms involved. The original and revised forms of the test are compared, with some discussion of procedural considerations. Past and present uses of the test and future applications are considered.

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