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.