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

Abstract

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.

Computational prosodic markers for autism

“…They include poorer performance in ASD compared to TD on the Focus task (Peppé et al, 2007), and a significant difference on a lexical stress task (Paul et al, 2005; as noted, the latter was not a vocal imitation task and may thus make cognitive and verbal demands that differ from those made by our lexical stress task). The results from the Paul et al (2005) study are difficult to relate to the present study because no group matching information was provided, tasks involved reading text aloud, the age range was broad and older ( M age for ASD = 16.8, SD = 6.6), and certain tasks had serious ceiling effects.…”

“…Prosody characteristics noted for persons with ASD have included monotonous speech as well as sing-song speech, aberrant stress, atypical pitch patterns, abnormalities of rate and volume of speech, and problematic quality of voice (e.g., Baltaxe, 1981; Baltaxe, Simmons, & Zee, 1984; Shriberg, Paul, McSweeny, Klin, Cohen, & Volkmar, 2001). Findings obtained with the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems-Children instrument (PEPS-C; Peppé & McCann, 2003), a computerized battery of tests consisting of decontextualized tasks that span the linguistic-pragmatic-affective continuum, include poorer performance by children with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) children, particularly on affective and pragmatic prosody tasks (Peppé, McCann, Gibbon, O'Hare, & Rutherford, 2007; McCann, Peppé, Gibbon, O’Hare, & Rutherford, 2007). …”

Relations Among Detection of Syllable Stress, Speech Abnormalities, and Communicative Ability in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Specifically, some research groups reported that individuals with ASD exhibited deficits in the comprehension of grammatical cues of word stress (Paul, Augustyn, Klin, & Volkmar, 2005a;Peppé et al, 2007), whereas others have not (Chevallier, Noveck, Happé, & Wilson, 2009;Crossman et al, 2010;Järvinen-Pasley, Peppé, King-Smith, & Heaton, 2008a). A similar pattern of inconsistencies in the results is evident in studies exploring the ability to use stress to perceive phrase structures in individuals with ASD.…”

“…A similar pattern of inconsistencies in the results is evident in studies exploring the ability to use stress to perceive phrase structures in individuals with ASD. Specifically, some studies have reported evidence for impaired performance in individuals with ASD relative to controls (Diehl, Benneton, Watson, Gunlogson & McDonough, 2008;Jarvinen-Pasley et al, 2008a), while other studies have not found significant group differences on performance (Paul et al, 2005a;Peppé et al, 2007).…”

“…Most of the studies in this area have focused primarily on the perception of pragmatic/affective prosody (Chevallier, Noveck, Happé, & Wilson, 2011;Globerson et al, 2014;Golan, Baron-Cohen, & Hill, 2006;Golan, Baron-Cohen, Hill, & Rutherford, 2007;Grossman, Bemis, Plesa Skwerer, & Tager-Flusberg, 2010;Heikkinen et al, 2010;Järvinen-Pasley, Wallace, Ramus, Happé, & Heaton, 2008b;Jones et al, 2011;Kleinman, Marciano, & Ault, 2001;Lindner & Rosén, 2006;Peppé, McCann, Gibbon, O'Hare & Rutherford, 2007;Rutherford, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright, 2002). Several of these studies using complex vocal expressions (i.e.…”