Perception and Production of Prosody by Speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Speakers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show difficulties in suprasegmental aspects of speech production, or prosody, those aspects of speech that accompany words and sentences and create what is commonly called "tone of voice." However, little is known about the perception of prosody, or about the specific aspects of prosodic production that result in the perception of "oddness." The present study examined the perception and production of a range of specific prosodic elements in an experimental protocol involving natural speech among speakers with ASD between 14 and 21 years of age, in comparison with a typical control group. Results revealed ceiling effects limiting interpretation of findings for some aspects of prosody. However, there were significant between-group differences in aspects of stress perception and production. The implications of these findings for understanding prosodic deficits is speakers with autism spectrum disorders, and for future research in this area, are discussed.

Receptive and Expressive Prosodic Ability in Children With High-Functioning Autism

“…This is perhaps some evidence in favour of the hypothesis put forward by Paul et al (2005) that children with autism would be likely to perform better on grammatical tasks, where options tend to the categorial, than on pragmatic/affective tasks where perceptions tend to be scalar. The Focus Output result supports the finding of Baltaxe and Guthrie (1987) that accent on the first item is the default place for children with HFA.…”

“…For example, in a recent study (Paul et al, 2005), one of the prosodic forms was named "phrasing" and defined as "the pattern of rate and pausing within utterances" (p.207). One of the authors' valid and interesting aims was to see if "phrasing" could be used in pragmatic/affective functions as well as grammatical ones.…”

“…A more recent paper (Paul et al, 2005) investigates perception and production of prosody in children with autism. The study is considered in some detail because its procedures closely resemble those of the current one: Paul et al used six tasks eliciting expressive data and six testing receptive skills in three different functional aspects of prosody and three aspects of prosodic form.…”

Intact emotion facilitation for nonsocial stimuli in autism: Is amygdala impairment in autism specific for social information?

“…Behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging studies in autism consistently demonstrate deficits in the building blocks for social interaction, such as impaired recognition and memory for facial and vocal expressions (Golan et al, 2006;Humphreys et al, 2007;Paul et al, 2005); reduced use and recognition of emotionally salient aspects of imitation and gesture (Colgan et al, 2006;Hobson & Meyer, 2005); and limited consideration of others' mental states in joint attention or theory of mind tasks (Baron-Cohen et al, 1999;Rutherford et al, 2006).…”

Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality

“…There are a number of studies finding differences between people with ASD and people with typical development (TD). In terms of deficits in social communication, there have been reports describing atypical usage of gestures (Ashley and Inge-Marie, 2010), frequency of eye-contact and laughter (Geraldine et al, 1990), prosody (McCann and Peppe, 2003;Rhea et al, 2005), voice quality (Asgari et al, 2013), delay responses (Heeman et al, 2010), and unexpected words (Rouhizadeh et al, 2013). In this paper, we particularly focus on the cues of ASD that appear in children's language and speech…”