Linguistic Tone and Non-Linguistic Pitch Imitation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation

Abstract

The conclusions on prosodic pitch features in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have primarily been derived from studies in non-tonal language speakers. This cross-linguistic study evaluated the performance of imitating Cantonese lexical tones and their non-linguistic (nonspeech) counterparts by Cantonese-and Mandarin-speaking children with and without ASD. Acoustic analyses showed that, compared with typically developing peers, children with ASD exhibited increased pitch variations when imitating lexical tones, while performed similarly when imitating the nonspeech counterparts. Furthermore, Mandarin-speaking children with ASD failed to exploit the phonological knowledge of segments to improve the imitation accuracy of non-native lexical tones. These findings help clarify the speech-specific pitch processing atypicality and phonological processing deficit in tone-language-speaking children with ASD.

Cross-linguistic patterns of speech prosodic differences in autism: A machine learning study

“…Perhaps a more revealing aspect of Model 1 is its cross-linguistic design, examining both English and Cantonese utterance samples. Relatively few studies [ 3 , 34 – 36 ] have examined prosody in ASD in languages prosodically and typologically distinct from English [ 41 ]. All of these studies focused only on pitch, and only one [ 36 ] applied a cross-linguistic design to allow direct comparisons of prosody across multiple languages, in the same speech sampling context.…”

“…Relatively few studies [ 3 , 34 – 36 ] have examined prosody in ASD in languages prosodically and typologically distinct from English [ 41 ]. All of these studies focused only on pitch, and only one [ 36 ] applied a cross-linguistic design to allow direct comparisons of prosody across multiple languages, in the same speech sampling context. The ML algorithm employed in Model 1 was able to classify ASD diagnosis using rhythm-relevant acoustic features (ENV, IMF, and TMS) derived from both English and Cantonese, revealing strong performance for classification (median AUCs ∼ 0.9) in both languages respectively.…”

“…A separate study of Cantonese-speaking individuals with ASD examined f0 measures of sentence final particles (SFPs), which are crucial linguistic markers for conveying pragmatic information in the language [ 35 ]. Another study examined lexical tone imitation of Cantonese- vs. Mandarin-speaking children with ASD [ 36 ]. These studies revealed findings similar to those reported in English-speaking individuals with ASD, such that the individuals with ASD exhibited higher f0 [ 34 ] and larger standard deviation (i.e., larger variability) of f0 [ 35 , 36 ].…”

“…Another study examined lexical tone imitation of Cantonese- vs. Mandarin-speaking children with ASD [ 36 ]. These studies revealed findings similar to those reported in English-speaking individuals with ASD, such that the individuals with ASD exhibited higher f0 [ 34 ] and larger standard deviation (i.e., larger variability) of f0 [ 35 , 36 ]. Some language-specific results were also observed, including shorter lexical tone duration in the ASD group [ 34 ].…”

“…Important cross-linguistic variability has also been observed, especially in linguistic prosody [ 15 , 33 ]. Indeed, prior cross-linguistic comparisons between prosodic characteristics of ASD have been reported in languages which are typologically and prosodically related (e.g., English and Danish, both Germanic languages [ 41 ], and Cantonese and Mandarin, both Sinitic languages [ 36 ]). However, studying prosody in ASD across languages with more distinct properties, such as English and Cantonese, may help to further reveal core prosodic differences that are robustly expressed across languages, as well as those that are differentially impacted, suggesting phenotypic malleability that could be important to consider in speech and language interventions.…”