Speech and Prosody Characteristics of Adolescents and Adults With High-Functioning Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Abstract

Speech and prosody-voice profiles for 15 male speakers with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) and 15 male speakers with Asperger syndrome (AS) were compared to one another and to profiles for 53 typically developing male speakers in the same 10- to 50-years age range. Compared to the typically developing speakers, significantly more participants in both the HFA and AS groups had residual articulation distortion errors, uncodable utterances due to discourse constraints, and utterances coded as inappropriate in the domains of phrasing, stress, and resonance. Speakers with AS were significantly more voluble than speakers with HFA, but otherwise there were few statistically significant differences between the two groups of speakers with pervasive developmental disorders. Discussion focuses on perceptual-motor and social sources of differences in the prosody-voice findings for individuals with Pervasive Developmental Disorders as compared with findings for typical speakers, including comment on the grammatical, pragmatic, and affective aspects of prosody.

Computational prosodic markers for autism

“…(Note that in the Paul et al paradigm, the participant read a sentence aloud in which lexical stress -- e.g., pre’sent vs. ‘ present -- had to be inferred from the sentential context; we also note that the English language contains only a few word pairs that differ in stress only, and that, moreover, as in the case of present , these words are not generally familiar to young children.) The Emphatic Stress task (Shriberg et al, 2001; Shriberg, Ballard, Tomblin, Duffy, Odell, & Williams, 2006) is also a vocal imitation task. Here, the child repeats an utterance in which one word is emphasized ( BOB may go home , Bob MAY go home , etc.).…”

“…Recent research has, however, begun to document impairments. 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).…”

“…We apply these methods in a research protocol that addresses several methodological shortcomings discussed by McCann and Peppé (2003) in their review of prosody in ASD, by using samples of individuals with ASD that (i) are well-characterized; (ii) matched on key variables such as non-verbal IQ and age; (iii) have adequate sizes (most studies reviewed by McCann & Peppé have samples of fewer than 10 individuals, and only three out of thirteen studies reviewed have samples larger than 15); and (iv) have an adequately narrow age range (e.g., the studies with the largest numbers of participants, regrettably, have wide age ranges: 7–32 years in Fine, J., Bartolucci, G., Ginsberg, G., & Szatmari (1991); 10–50 years in Shriberg et al (2001); and, in a more recent study not covered by McCann & Peppé, 7–28 years in Paul, Bianchi, Augustyn, Klin, & Volkmar (2008)). …”

Características e Especificidades da Comunicação Social na Perturbação do Espectro do Autismo

“…Por sua vez, a Semântica implica o conhecimento do significado das palavras e, neste ponto, crianças com PEA também apresentam desempenhos inferiores quando comparadas com crianças de grupos de controle, contudo, se nos referirmos à fonologia (produção física das palavras e articulação do discurso), este será o aspeto da lin-guagem menos afetado em crianças com PEA, apesar dos déficits articulatórios encontrados (SHRIBERG et al, 2001). …”

Strategies for pharmacologic treatment of high functioning autism and Asperger syndrome

“…Although there has been an effort to identify features that differentiate HFA and some AS [7,8], it is premature to be confident about this distinction [9][10][11][12].…”