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metadata page in eResearch eResearch policies on access and re-use can be viewed on our This series consists of unpublished "working" papers. They are not final versions and may be superseded by publication in journal or book form, which should be cited in preference.All rights remain with the author(s) at this stage, and circulation of a work in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

Prosody can be conceived as having form (auditory-perceptual characteristics) and function (pragmatic/linguistic meaning). No known studies have examined the relationship between form-and functionlevel prosodic skills in relation to the effects of stimulus length and/or complexity upon such abilities in autism. Research in this area is both insubstantial and inconclusive. Children with autism and controls completed the receptive tasks of the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children (PEPS-C) test, which examines both form-and function-level skills, and a sentence-level task assessing the understanding of intonation. While children with autism were unimpaired in both form and function tasks at the single-word level, they showed significantly poorer performance in the corresponding sentence-level tasks than controls. Implications for future research are discussed.

a b s t r a c tThe expressive prosodic abilities of two groups of school-age children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC), Asperger's syndrome (AS) and high-functioning autism (HFA), were compared with those of typically-developing controls. The HFA group showed impairment relative to age-matched controls on all the prosody tasks assessed (affect, sentence-type, contrastive stress, phrasing and imitation) while the AS showed impairment only on phrasing and imitation. Compared with lexically-matched controls, impairment on several tasks (affect, contrastive stress and imitation) was found in the HFA group but little in the AS group (phrasing and imitation). Comparisons between the ASC groups showed considerable differences on prosody skills. Impairment in prosodic skills may therefore be a reliable indicator of autism spectrum subgroups, at least as far as communicative functioning is concerned. There were also significant differences between ASC groups and lexically-matched typically-developing children on expressive language skills, but the incomplete correlation of the prosody results with scores on language tasks suggests that the prosodic differences between the two groups may not all be attributable to the level of language skills. Suggested further research is to investigate the relationship of prosody and language skills in this population more closely, and to develop a prosody test as part of the diagnostic criteria of ASC.

This study aimed to find out what intonation features reliably represent the emotions of "liking" as opposed to "disliking" in the Spanish language, with a view to designing a prosody assessment procedure for use with children with speech and language disorders. 18 intonationally different prosodic realisations (tokens) of one word (limón) were recorded by one native Spanish speaker. The tokens were deemed representative of two categories of emotion: liking or disliking of the taste "lemon". 30 native Spanish speakers assigned them to the two categories and rated their expressiveness on a six-point scale. For all tokens except two, agreement between judges as to category was highly significant, some tokens attracting 100% agreement. The intonation contours most related to expressiveness levels were: for "liking", an inverted U form contour with exaggerated pitch peak within the tonic syllable; and for "disliking", a flat melodic contour with a slight fall.

Objective: To develop the Irish-English version of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C) assessment, identify the normal prosodic performance of typically developing children aged 5–11 years on the PEPS-C assessment, and identify significant age-related changes between different age groups. Method: Thirty typically developing children between the ages of 5;9 and 11;1 years completed the PEPS-C assessment, which involved both receptive and expressive tasks. Results: Significant differences were found between the youngest group’s prosodic performance and the two older groups. The 5- to 6-year-old age group performed less well than the 10- to 11-year-old age group (p < 0.05). The 10- to 11-year-old age group performed above chance level on all prosodic tasks. Conclusion: While 5- and 6-year-old children have acquired some functional prosodic skills, there are further developments between the ages of 5;9 and 9;5, with some aspects of prosody continuing to develop up to 11 years.