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.

Research undertaken to date suggests

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.

Intonation has been little studied in children with speech and language impairments, although deficits in related aspects of prosody have been hypothesized to underlie specific language impairment. In this study a new intonation battery, the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems-Child version (PEPS-C), was administered to 18 children with speech and/or language impairments (LI). PEPS-C comprises 16 tasks (8 x 8, Input x Output) tapping phonetic and functional aspects of intonation in four areas: grammar, affect, interaction, and pragmatics. Scores were compared to a chronological age (CA) matched group of 28 children and a group of 18 children matched for language comprehension (LC). Measures of language comprehension, expressive language, nonverbal intelligence, and segmental phonology were also taken. The LI group did not score significantly below the LC group on any PEPS-C task. On 5 of 16 tasks, the LI group scored significantly lower than the CA group. In the LI group, there were just 2 significant correlations between a PEPS-C task and 1 of the nonprosodic measures. The results support the view that intonation is relatively discrete from other levels of speech and language while suggesting some specific areas of possible vulnerability: auditory memory for longer prosodic strings and the of prosody for pragmatic/interactional purposes.

No abstract

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...

BackgroundAutism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by a specific triad of symptoms such as abnormalities in social interaction, abnormalities in communication and restricted activities and interests. While verbal autistic subjects may present a correct mastery of the formal aspects of speech, they have difficulties in prosody (music of speech), leading to communication disorders. Few behavioural studies have revealed a prosodic impairment in children with autism, and among the few fMRI studies aiming at assessing the neural network involved in language, none has specifically studied prosodic speech. The aim of the present study was to characterize specific prosodic components such as linguistic prosody (intonation, rhythm and emphasis) and emotional prosody and to correlate them with the neural network underlying them.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe used a behavioural test (Profiling Elements of the Prosodic System, PEPS) and fMRI to characterize prosodic deficits and investigate the neural network underlying prosodic processing. Results revealed the existence of a link between perceptive and productive prosodic deficits for some prosodic components (rhythm, emphasis and affect) in HFA and also revealed that the neural network involved in prosodic speech perception exhibits abnormal activation in the left SMG as compared to controls (activation positively correlated with intonation and emphasis) and an absence of deactivation patterns in regions involved in the default mode.Conclusions/SignificanceThese prosodic impairments could not only result from activation patterns abnormalities but also from an inability to adequately use the strategy of the default network inhibition, both mechanisms that have to be considered for decreasing task performance in High Functioning Autism.